I was actually thinking just this past week about developing a similar system to Google Moderator for Lectures at my university where students with laptops could send the professor a question and then the professor could just go through the list of questions or answer your question privately later via email or something like that.

Great Idea for the corporate sector!

I hope this takes off in some cutting edge offices so we can see it’s true potential.

Sure enough, Google assigned new PR today. Your suspicion was correct Matt!

Matt I got a question/idea depending on whether something like this exists already.

The ability to mark a part of or specific content on a page as non-indexable.

Why would I need this? Well, Google is able to ignore it’s own ads obviously and not just to them being javascript either.

But there are a lot of other ad systems out there, and in my case on a project I’m working on, we’ll be rolling out our own system.

Some form of new attribute that could be put in any tag to mark is as non-indexable would be great.

The result would be that a external or automated/rotating ad, or some other feed or whatever would not cause false positives or poison the context of the page itself, thus making Googles index of that page even more accurate when people search.

Example: Be it a external ad, internal ad or some feed, containing words like “milk” but the page it’s shown in has nothing to do with milk, but computers instead.

Such a attribute would solve this issue.

SEO’s should love this as they avoid external or random content from poisoning the page context.
Various advertisers and news feeds should also like this as they avoid poisoning their clients/target websites.

If no such attribute exist, I’m not sure what to suggest.
HTML5 has a “irrelevant” attribute but it’s definition to not suit this use,
so a different global attribute would have to be defined.

Lesse…how about a “context” attribute? (kinda makes sense doesnt’ it?)

This means that you could have a {div context=”noindex”}blah blah{/div} and any search engine (and browser) would know that this content is not considered a part of the page context but rather foreign content.

Since it would be a global attribute it could also be used with {p} or even an {iframe} or even {a} and {span} and so on.

Definition of “irrelevant” attribute: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/semantics.html#irrelevant
Which as you see would not be suitable for the purpose I described above sadly although it’s name would suggest otherwise it’s behavior is similar though.

The cool thing though with a global “context” attribute is that it could easily replace the current rel=”nofollow” because you could do:
{a href=”http://example.com/” context=”nofollow”}blah{/a} and Google could give no weight to the link but still index the link text.

Or {a href=”http://example.com/” context=”noindex”}blah{/a} and it would follow it but not index the text of the link itself.

And {a href=”http://example.com/” context=”"}blah{/a} would be the same as if the attribute was not used at all.

Oh and one could do {a href=”http://example.com/” context=”noindex,nofollow”}blah{/a} and it would not follow nor index the text of the link.

Am I on to something here with this idea or?

I just came up with this today when I got frustrated by a false positive. The content/text of a ad on a page had the keywords that I searched for but the context of the page was nowhere near relevant to my search so it was a dead end for me.

Both SEO’s and advertisers would most likely want to use content=”noindex” as that alone would prevent their ad or external/foreign content from poisoning the context of the page they are on.

Remember, I hit a dead end thanks to a ad poisoning the context of a page, whether the site otherwise was relevant I have no clue as I went back to Google to refine my search, so that’s one lost visitor and one ad ignored, nobody wins.

With my idea, I can see no drawbacks, at worst (hardly anybody use it) thee is hardly any change from today, at best (everybody use it appropriately) and we’ll see Google and other search engines with reduced false positives, and advertisers can be sure that their ads wont hurt the content of the page they are displayed in, or that the news feed on a page won’t hurt the site’s page contexts, and so on.