Thank you in advance for taking the time to read this; I am not a web guy at all and recently have been instructed to do some SEO tweaks. An issue I am coming across is that the most common words used on our site come from a statement of privacy that is found only in the footer.php This was brought to my attention by using some of those SEO checking sites that analyze your website and tell you what issues there are. I saw a section that mentioned "keywords cloud" with words such as, "term, discretion, policy, privacy"
I thought that typically, the footer wasn't something that is indexed; but when I view page source I can see that text plain as day so it is getting indexed.
how and where would i need to put the no-index instruction in my footer.php to stop search engines from indexing the statement of privacy text?
Robot instructions only work by full resulting pages, you cannot instruct a google crawler not to index just the footer.php. One thing you might try is put the footer section inside a iframe, since I read that some crawlers cannot see what is inside an iframe.Or, anoher thing that crawlers can't see is images; so you can make the footer a jpg or flash object.
I was trying not to change too much as again im not a web guy that knows html and php the best. currently the statement pops up in a modal window that is in the footer. Would it be better to create a statement.php and link it to the footer then tell the robot.txt not to index that page?
But it would keep the robot from indexing the same statement on every page that the footer is linked to right? I really dont care if its indexed the problem (I think) is that it indexes the statement with every page that uses the include footer.php which makes these junk words seem like the most important ones on each and every page. again be patient with me as this is my understanding on how it works.
The process goes as follows: 1) the PHP scripts first run, including your footer.php. 2) a virtual web page is generated on the fly by the PHP scripts. 3) the Google crawler sees the resulting virtual web page, including the unwanted keywords. The Google crawler does not read the PHP files, it reads the resulting generated virtual web page.
If you make another PHP file like statement.php, it would get run along with your other PHP scripts, and the resulting virtual web page would look the same. The Google crawler sees that resulting virtual web page and indexes it along with the unwanted keywords, which is still present ( in your statement.php). The Google crawler sees the resulting virtual web page, generated with all the PHP scripts, which looks the same as before.
The way to make the Google crawler not see the unwanted words is to make them unreadable to it. Since Google crawler can not process HTML elements; the way to make Google not index the unwanted words is to add an HTML element inside your footer.php and put the unwanted privacy bracketed inside the tags. The resulting virtual web page would look the same to you and me, but Google can't see the privacy part.
Note that I read the Google crawler can visit sites and process some variations of tags. The surest way to make Google crawler not see something is to place the privacy statements inside a jpg image file. Google definitely cannot read and process a jpg.
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