How Tell Search Engines to Ignore Certain Text

[BigChris]

Hi Everyone!

If any can help me with the below I would be most grateful.

I would like certain text on my websites (the text at the bottom that states "Copyright © 2008 New Age Communications LLC") not to be indexed by websites.

Does anybody know how best to do this?

Thank you for your time, Chris

[beu]

You might try using that text in an image with no ALT text. Why do you see this text as a problem?

[BigChris]

Hi beu,

Apologies for the delay in responding - I was traveling and my login info was saved on my home computer.

I was trying to keep images to a minimum, as it is just another http request, etc.

The reason I want to do this is my computer operates websites for various companies and my company does not like to reveal which websites we operate (as our competition would find this information very useful). Yet, for legal purposes we still have to put the "Copyright © 2008 New Age Communications LLC" at the bottom of the page. Thus, we are concerned that all a competitor has to do is search for "Copyright © 2008 New Age Communications LLC" to find a list of the websites we operate. Thus, we do not want search engines to index the "Copyright © 2008 New Age Communications LLC" that appears on the websites that we operate.

Any ideas on how we can do this?

Thank you for your time, Chris

[felisha]

Well, you have a valid reason for your text problem. Beu's idea is OK. All content on the page will be indexed by a search engine especially google, even images with alt text. so just try to make an image which looks like "Copyright © 2008 New Age Communications LLC" with no alt text...Surely your competitors wont be able to find those websites you operated.

[jimbeetle]

Hey BigChris, you can also consider putting the boilerplate text in and iframe and slapping a robots noindex meta on the framed text page.

But, if this is for legal purposes you might want to first get with one of your house lawyers to determine whether either method would meet the requirement as in each case the text would not actually be on the page.