There are times when we need to copy-paste large chunks of text from a source and use it on our own website. You may give necessary credits to the original source, but Google would still find this duplicate content, and thus, may penalize you for same.
Some examples may be:
- A law-related website quoting a complete case.
- A poetry website with complete poem, and original explanation.
- Any other website quoting something from, say, a press release.
In all these cases, you can simply prevent search engines from indexing the complete pages using the noindex tag, but that would mean that not even your original parts of the text will appear in search results. Do you really want that? No.
Well then, here’s a nice, less-technical work around to prevent search engines from indexing certain parts of pages.
Let’s get started, shall we?
For this post, I’ll be using this article written by me and published originally on EzineArticles.
First of all, I’ll copy the article, and create a new HTML file with it. Use this template for easy HTML file creation.
<html>
<head>
<title>Article Title Here</title>
</head>
<body>
Article Goes Here…
</body>
</html>
You can style the article body per your requirements. You can use CSS to style the text with your website/blog’s style.
Now, before we upload this file to our server, we need to add just one line of code to this HTML file.
In the <head> section of the file, add this one line:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
The robots meta tag in the above example instructs all search engine not to show the page in search results. When you’re done, upload this file to your server.
Next, we need to embed this HTML file into our page using iframes.
To do this, simply paste the following code wherever you want to display the contents of the file.
<iframe src=”http://www.link.to/your/HTML-file.html” height=”500px” width=”640px”></iframe>
Obviously, you’ll need to change the link to the HTML file you uploaded. You can change the height and width of iframes per your needs.
That’s it! You don’t need to do anything else!
Here’s what the final iframe should look like. I have changed the height of the iframe as per my content.
Now, I don’t need to worry about search engines’ duplicate penalty and can serve brilliant content to my website readers.
Let me know what you think about this trick in the comments below.
Very useful post! But I have a question, noindex tag is HTML4 or HTML5 tags, and what has happened when Google index certains parts of pages?
Actually, what you should have asked is “META tag is HTML4 or HTML5”. META tag is HTML4 tag, and you can read more about it here: http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
As for uses, some examples of blocking parts of pages may be:
– A law-related website quoting a complete case.- A poetry website with complete poem, and original explanation.- Any other website quoting something from, say, a press release.
that content is indexed…any thoughts on other solutions?
Hello Robyn
The page is still indexed, and I wonder why. There is the “noindex” tag on the page (http://img.mashgeek.com/2012/06/noindex.html), but Google may not have respected that.
I’ll look into more solutions, and update the post.
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Karan