Is there a way to tell Google, certain elements are irrelavent to page?

Question

I have a page that shows the main product for that page, next to it though are "related products" which when you click on them you go to their page, and they have their own related products as well. The problem is that the related products are getting indexed by Google so when you search for product-A you may get the product-B page where product-A is a related item, instead of just getting the product-A page. I am trying to prevent this. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can add rel="nofollow" in any links you don't want a bot to crawl. In this case, you can apply that tag to all your links and google won't follow them off your main page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

EDIT for clarification:

Page "A" is for widgets. You want this page to be returned for searches regarding widgets; on this page is a "related searches" section which links to Other Widgets. On all the anchor tags on page "A" which link to pages "B" and "C" (the related searches for Other Widgets), you'll put a rel="nofollow" tag. This will prevent Google from hitting page A and then following your "related searches" links off to pages "B" and "C".

This will NOT prevent pages "B" and "C" from being indexed on their own, it just prevents them from getting pulled in from page "A".

EDIT#2: rel="nofollow" tells bots you don't want them to follow the link to the second page. Regardless of the anchor text on a link from A->B, if you've nofollowed it the bot won't "flow" pagerank to the linked-to page and should not follow the link to page "B" to index it due to that tag on the anchor. Note that this is not foolproof: Yahoo and other SE's may not treat nofollow like Google....so your best bet is to make sure that each page is strongly on-page-SEO'd such that it gets included in the index for the term you want it to be included for. Hope this helps...but like much of the SEO world there are few hard-and-fast rules which apply universally.

Answer 2

yes... put them at the bottom of the page for content,

if you want that to appear visually at the top of the page, use a css layout to re-arrange the page elements

also, as darksquid already said, add rel="nofollow" to links you don't want considered

another tip (pertaining to your comment on darksquid's post):

You could load the content via ajax, which would keep most search engine spiders from seeing it at all (since they don't generally execute javascript)