Alasdair Mackenzie

Google off / Google on…

November 24th, 2007 Posted in Google, Internet, Web Design

If this looks familiar then it’s a shame.

[if IE]> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="iehacks.css" /> <![endif]-->

For years Microsoft provided, knowingly and unwittingly (usually because of parsing errors/ conditional comments), the ability to ‘hack’ away at a web page to make it look right in Internet explorer.

In my opinion it is wrong to change the way the web works to suit a particular vendor, but it’s the norm and, admittedly, it does help solve a lot of problems (and I have used it).

Anyway, enough said about Microsoft, Google’s at it now! **[see note]

<!–googleoff: index–><a href=”/help/accessibility.html” tabindex=”1″ id=”accesslink”>Accessibility</a><!–googleon: index–>

“The googleoff/googleon tags disable the indexing of a part of a web page. The result is that those pages do not appear in search results when users search for the tagged word or phrase. For example, some developers use googleoff/googleon tags to comment out a navigation bar in static HTML pages.” [Paul Haymen]

I’m all for meta tags to do this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />

But, as I said, it’s my feeling that custom code / tags in HTML documents should be avoided, but I suppose getting higher in Google outweighs the disadvantages for 99.9% of people (and just in case you’re wondering where that accessibility example came from: adobe.com, which has a PageRank 10 by the way - and, at least, a $30,000 GSA investment).

I’ve also no idea when Google introduced this. The earliest mention I can find is January 2007.

You would think organizations would have learned not to tinker, after all theW3C is there for a reason.

If you want to find out more about it then Paul Hayman has written a concise tutorial about GoogleOff.

**Note: I should point out that this is not actually implemented in the Google Web Search. It’s a function of Google Appliance, which is for enterprise search (which is besides the point).