Prevent part of a page from being indexed/cached by search engines

Is this even possible?

[zomega42]

Many of the pages on my site include contact info for people who have posted things. But, they sometimes get upset if they type their phone number into Google and these pages come up with their name, address, etc.

Is there any way to prevent Google and the other major SEs from caching/indexing just certain parts of the page? I cannot use robots.txt or meta robots, the rest of the page has to remain crawlable and searchable.

If I use character codes to spell out the names/phone numbers, will that prevent them from being indexed? Or maybe there's some special tag I can use?

Thanks!

[encyclo]

There is no direct way to control indexing of parts of a page. There are a few "workaround" possibilities you can consider:

- writing the non-indexable content via external Javascript from a robots-excluded directory
- insert the content via a borderless iframe which conains a meta noindex element or is excluded by robots.txt
- use an image instead of text

Each of these alternatives have their own usability and accessibility downsides.

Note that using character entities won't prevent the text from being interpreted and indexed by search engines.

[zomega42]

Thanks encyclo -- I think I may move over to images, as this would prevent those nasty bots too.

[Xapti]

Nono I heard something about blocking crawlers for just sections of a page...
It's not well implemented though.. like not all crawlers obey it and such.
I don't remember what it was called, or how it works, though. But I know it's exactly what you want :\

[topr8]

just a couple of thoughts ...

a) - warn people that posting information on the internet is very public, remember that it is not just the search engines that have a record of those phone numbers, all kinds of other people use robots to retrieve and store web pages for all kinds of reasons from the totally harmless to the very suspect.

b) - maybe a method where contact details can only be seen if a user is logged in, this would prevent most search engines from seeing the phone numbers and so on. (WebmasterWorld does a version of this, check out the pages both logged in and not logged in)

... however both methods may effect either the usability of your site and/or people's willingness to post.

[piatkow]

c) if personal data is optional then make the fact clear. People may be frightened off if they think info is mandatory.

There are always a few professional complainers around who will find something "wrong".