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We have a question from Youser. I’m doing the question mainly because I like to say:
Youser. Youser asks: “Is there a way to tell Google bots to exclude recurring words
on a website such as ‘leave comment’ or ‘print page’ when indexing in order to
improve the keyword density?”
Well, Youser -- um -- I in general wouldn’t worry about that. So, whenever people start
talking about keyword density, they are usually worried about stuff that are more granular
level than they should be worrying about. If you're at the point where taking out the
words ‘leave comment’ or ‘print page’ seriously affect the keyword density of your
page, you have some pretty outrageous keyword density. In general, I wouldn’t worry about
that. Now, Yahoo has an interesting standard where they have said you can block out parts
of a page and it won’t index parts of that page, which I think is a pretty cool idea.
Um, the problem that we’ve seen whenever we have looked at the usage of that on the
web, is not that many people use it. And to implement support for that, and then maintain
support for that as we write new indexing code would be a little bit prohibitive. So,
Google, at least right now, doesn’t have a way to say: OK, this part of the page --
don’t index this part of the page. In theory, you could throw it in an iframe that was then
blocked in text, and I can guarantee you at that point you are probably putting a lot
more effort into trying to leave out that ‘leave comment’ or ‘print page’ phrase
than you probably should be. So, in general, if you are at the point where you are worried
about keyword density, I would take a step back, take a deep breath, think about other
good content you can write and other good ways that you can promote it, rather than
worried about that level of detail.