HTML noindex Tag
Someone on Twitter asked Google if they index content contained within the HTML tag, "noindex" (not to be confused with the robots meta tag directive) and, as far as I could tell, never received a response. I took to the Google Webmaster Help forum for an answer and a member stated his opinion that, "virtually no one supports this tag." I try not to rely on opinions when I'm getting paid to do SEO work so I thought it called for a simple test.
An obvious component of an SEO test is an obscure term or phrase and one of the obscure terms I use is, "." It's a misspelling of the also somewhat obscure term, "haberdashery" so it makes for a really effective test variable. So in the interest of making the most out of this test, I've wrapped the misspelling in the noindex HTML tag and included the correct spelling for another unrelated test (that we'll just keep between you and me). I've got this blog hooked up to a plethora of ping URLs so the results should be visible pretty quickly.