It doesn’t appear that Googlebot (or other spiders, for that matter) index content inside an HTML module. I’ve always wondered about this, so I decided to test it with my site designerwebsites.org. Here's what I did:
- First, I typed site:designerwebsites.org in Google. That returned 11 pages – all pages on the site.
- Next, I searched within results for Building Web Sites with Office Live, which is the heading of the home page. I got back 7 results. The heading is in Zone 1. So it appeared in bold as the first of 7 results. The remaining 6 entries appeared because the search phrase happens to be in the tiles of those pages. So far so good.
- Then I searched withing results for AcxedeWidget, which is a phrase on the home page but, unlike the heading, is inside an HTML module. Google returned nothing!
I tried this exercise with several other sites, pages, and search phrases. Same result.
Moral of the story? Search engines can’t (or don’t) index content within Office Live Small Business’s HTML modules.
So much for making your pages prettier with HTML!