Avoid crawling part of a page with "googleoff" and "googleon"

Question

I am trying to tell Google and other search engines not to crawl some parts of my web page.

What I do is:

<!--googleoff: all-->

<select name="ddlCountry" id="ddlCountry">
<option value="All">All</option>
<option value="bahrain">Bahrain</option>
<option value="china">China</option>
</select>

<!--googleon: all-->

After I uploaded the page, I noticed that search engines are stilling rendering elements within the googleoff markup.

Am I doing something wrong?

Elayneelazaro

I'm not sure but everything I've read about googleoff sounds like it only applies to a Google Search Appliance, not necessarily Google.com itself. – Barhorst

Not sure about how seo-browser works for live updating, as it also might have a crawler set on a time basis. What about using a monkey-script or addon to firebug or inspector – Fielder

Hello, i got firebug and just installed monkey-script but how to use these tools to check to accomplish my goal? thanks. – Elayneelazaro

try to use <!--googleoff: index--> and <!--googleon: index--> instead of all – Journalize

Thanks Sumit. I justed changed the code and uploaded. but its still not working. the text inside google tag are still showing. help. – Elayneelazaro

The googleon and googleoff tags only stop putting words inside the tags as searchable keywords. But the links will still be crawled. – Acronym

As someone already said, these tags are only for Google enterprise search and do not apply to the Google search engine that you are all saying it works for. See the page in Google's Enterprise help documents describing this. All the Google search engine allows you to do is take a page/URL out of the index, NOT a part of it.Ref: google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/… – Castroprauxel

I voted to close this question because it is not a programming question and it is off-topic on Stack Overflow. Non-programming questions about your website should be asked on Webmasters. In this case the question has already been asked and answered there: Can you use googleon and googleoff comments to prevent Googlebot from indexing part of a page? – Typical

Answer 1

"googleon" and "googleoff" are only supported by the Google Search Appliance (when you host your own search results, usually for your own internal website).

They are not supported by Google's web-search at all.

Ardeb

A fine and clear answer John, just what this confused thread needed! I have also clarified the situation on the two misleading comment threads that were open, and repeat that reference here, in support of your correct answer. It is the relevant section in Google's enterprise search docs: google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/… – Castroprauxel

Answer 2

Is replaced by data attribute data-nosnippet only to div, span, or section elements, as shown here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/robots_meta_tag?hl=en#data-nosnippet-attr

Prisage

data-nosnippet prevents Google from showing that text in the search results but it doesn't prevent Google from indexing the words contained in it. It is useful and good to know about, but I wouldn't say that it is a "replacement" for the functionality from the search appliance. – Typical

Answer 3

The correct googleon tag is as given below:

    <!--googleon: all>

Aurist

This is wrong, because it is missing two dashes before the closing angle bracket. Also it should be "index" not all. And finally it doesn't mention that this only applies to enterprise search software and not Google search proper. Reference: google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/… – Castroprauxel