bedeviled mojo slop

Robert Woodward wrote in a comment on the rel="nofollow" post:

Just trying to spawn a little support for this idea since you folks seem to be working closely with the search engines.

The rel="nofollow" tag, while a step in the right direction, stops short of preventing automated harvesting of sensitive URLs from within a web page with a simple engine search.

What is needed is something similar, like rel="noindex", which would prevent the URL from being indexed by the search engines at all.

For example, I can change the name of my comment script and the spammers disappear until the next time google indexes my site, and then they come back. If the URL to the script wasn't in the search engine in the first place, the spammer would have to manually visit each site to figure it out - very difficult to do and would turn an automated spamming process into a very manual one.

This would also make it more difficult to find other sensitive URLs, yet have the rest of the page content indexed.

Another idea would be to create tags that search engines would respect and not index between the tags - sort of like the NOINDEX parameter you can put on an entire page, or a robots.txt file, but it would only apply to text outside the noindex tags. I can think of lots of applications to where you would want your page indexed, but not certain pieces within the page...

Just an idea that requires some significant thought, but I think one that should be considered. Thanks for listening!

I think the rel="nofollow" initiative is just the beginning of a set of tags that will allow publishers to control how their content is harvested.

In the case of blogs, it's like micro-control for micro-content.

Looking at my original title for the post "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me", it's like, "I want you to bite me, but I don't like to be bitten around the face, chest, neck, or head. But the rest of me is fair game."

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr, very grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.