The intent is that you can tell Yahoo which content not to index, such as adverts and links to navigation and legal elements that are nothing to do with the content you want to rank for.

It has already been stated that this has no effect on link equity. If you don’t want links to count, you have to still use rel=”nofollow”

From the Yahoo Blog

I can think of lots of nefarious ways this can be used

• class=”this-is-what-the-user-really-sees”
• class=”this-is-my-ripped-off-content”
• class=”these-are-my-p0rn-ads”
• class=”I-am-not-a-thin-affiliate-really”

Just as casual internet users are almost totally unaware of the rel=”nofollow” attribute for links, it will take a long time before there is any awareness about Robots-Nocontent

Here is what some of the HTML I used above looks like

<ul class="robots-nocontent">
	<li>class="this-is-what-the-user-really-sees"</li>
	<li>class="this-is-my-ripped-off-content"</li>
	<li>class="these-are-my-p0rn-ads"</li>
	<li>class="I-am-not-a-thin-affiliate-really"</li>
</ul>

You see normal web visitors will get to see everything, and search engines whilst they might cache the whole document, the marked sections won’t affect rankings, good or bad.

There are certain internet industries that will no doubt love this new feature. Sure there are other ways around this such as using graphics, but I haven’t explored every possibility.

How To Display The Robots-Nocontent Hidden CSS Class

1. Go to and Install the Chrone Edit Plus Firefox Extension
2. Restart Firefox
3. Go to Tools->ChromeEdit Plus->ChromEdit. Select the userContent.css tab and paste the following code in plain text

a[rel~="nofollow"] {
  border: thin dashed firebrick ! important;
  background-color: rgb(255, 200, 200) ! important;
}

.robots-nocontent {
  border: thin dashed firebrick ! important;
  background-color: rgb(200, 255, 200) ! important;
}

The first part of this CSS is the original from Matt Cutts to highlight Nofollow links with a pink background.
The second part of the CSS highlights content with the Robots-Nocontent class applied

It is highly likely that this functionality will also be added to well known Firefox plugins such as Search Status and SEO for Firefox.

Danny Sullivan as usual has a good writeup on Robots-Nocontent.
Threadwatch has a slightly different perspective.

Also check out:- Andy Beal, WebProNews, FinalTag, John Andrews, Mashable & Techmeme