About skipping parts of a page

[willing]

Hi there

In the process of setting up the search on our site. I have a few questions. We have a footer inserted into each of our pages (it is a php file) and right now all the pages are showing up as there are lots of links in there. So I want to skip that info for the indexing.

1)
If I put the following into the code, I believe it will skip the content. I just want to be sure though that it will not affect the display of the page and importantly it will not affect anything related to other search engines (ie. google, yahoo, etc)

<!--ZOOMSTOP-->
<p>This section is skipped and no indexing will occur.</p>
Navigation menus, header, footer, etc. may appear here.
<!--ZOOMRESTART-->

I don't want to upset or change anything or our current standings in the major search engines.

2)
Should I insert that code in the main php page, or in the actual small php page that is inserted into the main php page. (Hope that makes sense!)

Thank you.

[Ray]

1) That is correct. Using the ZOOMSTOP and ZOOMRESTART tags will NOT have any effect on the display of the page, nor how they are viewed by external search engines such as Google or Yahoo. This is because they are HTML comments (note that they start with "<!--" and end with "-->").

2) It would probably be easier to add it to the "small php page" (I presume you mean the footer php which will be inserted into the actual page). Because that way you only need to add it to one file, as opposed to needing to update all your files.

Hope that helps.

[willing]

Thank you. That does reassure me and help out. Appreciate the reponse.