noindex on a partial page?

Working with SEO a bit, I’m seeking to do something I don’t think is possible: use a noindex tag to refer to part of a page. For example, the main page of the blogs get a lot of hits for whatever keywords happened to be there when Google last indexed it, when Google should correctly direct that traffic to the relevant post. But I want the main page to be indexed, because people search for blogs.n1zyy.com* and such, and they should find the main page.

Any tips on how to do this? The idea I’ve got in mind is to have the main page be purely static HTML, with an iframe that loads the blog posts and anything else that changes, so that the iframe can set a noindex tag. That way search engines can index the main page and send people for traffic that should come to the main page, but search engines will never see the blog posts on the main page.

(As part of this “sprint,” I’m also looking to set up a series of dynamic sitemaps to ensure that all public content is indexed.)

* Speaking with the CEO and architect of a very successful site, who also happens to be a usability expert, I had confirmed something I suspected for a while now: no one types in URLs anymore, which is why the #1 keyword bringing traffic from search engines is usually that site’s domain name. Absurd but true.

One thought on “noindex on a partial page?

  1. Ugh… So this does what it should, but I forgot that I hate iframes. They’re really not much more than frames — in particular, you get scrollbars.

    I want the content normally included in the page, which appears to take JavaScript. (And JavaScript brings it own bag of headaches…)

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