Yahoo’s Robots-Nocontent Tag

Most bloggers make use of SEO techniques like robots.txt, nofollow links, and AdSense section targeting to properly direct (or block) the attention of search engines. Earlier this month, Yahoo unveiled the newest addition to this list with the introduction of robots-nocontent.
This new attribute allows bloggers and webmasters to deemphasize areas of a page as irrelevant content. All you do is add class=”robots-nocontent” to your HTML like so:
<span class="robots-nocontent">
Navigation, menus, boilerplate text, ads, etc.
</span>
Putting this in place gives Yahoo the signal that the marked sections should not be factored in for ranking purposes. Instead, only the unique, relevant content on your pages is counted in the algorithm. Yahoo gets a more polished index and uses less bandwidth; you get higher and more relevant rankings. Everyone wins.
Keep in mind, though, that robots-nocontent has yet to be publicly adopted by the other search engines, particularly Google, so it won’t do anything to help your non-Yahoo rankings. It’s doubtful that using it would do any harm, however, and Yahoo is still the internet’s #2 search engine, so using robots-nocontent is still a good idea from an SEO standpoint.