I have had a few ideas in the past about how search engines should contribute to the spread of web development best practice in the past.

I have also changed my ideas on this a bit, after I had a few discussions with Google employees in the past. The point coming out of those conversations being that it shouldn’t be a search engines role to dictate accessibility or best practice web development across the web.

This role should be up to individual businesses and the web development community to decide what minimum level is acceptable and how to further educate and reach out to the masses on these topics. When it comes to Google, they are simply trying to index all of the pages on the internet as efficiently and thoroughly as possible.

Well, today  Yahoo has started creating microformats on their own accord. This Yahoo blog posting explains how to block content from being indexed, not at an external or robots level, actually within your HTML markup.

Here are a few examples of how to apply this attribute for various uses and different syntax options:

<div class=”robots-nocontent”> This is the navigational menu of the site and is common on all pages. It contains many terms and keywords not related to this site</div>

Is it just me? Or is this just wrong?

Yahoo have now decided to meddle and create protocols on how this should be coded, with actual examples of how to mark up <div>s, <span>s and other block level elements that a search engine should not regard as important content.

Now of course, I believe that no right-minded developer is actually going to bother with this new tag. Besides Yahoo being just a tiny blip on the Google horizon, why would any developer choose to litter such markup within their HTML pages? With concepts such as microformats and formalising the practice of semantic HTML with POSH, why would I even think about adding extraneous inline class names to my markup for the sake of a minority search engine?

My concern here is the search marketers or SEO gurus out there, that don’t really know code, but get wind of this new tag and begin to start changing markup on all of their sites without knowing what they are actually doing. My other concern, although not a huge one as Google strikes me as being quite switched on, is that other search engines start supporting this practice.

My solution? An external, search engine only protocol of some sort. Why can’t you reference these elements externally, just as we do with everything else in modern web development?

div#navigation {rel=”no-content”}

Could something like this (mine is a non-working sample of course) not be incorporated into the ever growing development and support for robots.txt? This inline ’solution’ is just plain ignorant and is not contributing to the web, as Google’s support for accessibility could have done, but only watering down the tag soup that is already out there.

Time to rethink your strategy Yahoo, and this time think about the bigger picture. It’s not your role as a search engine to dictate how I code my websites, just concentrate on finding the damn thing.