One SEO professional was concerned about random meta descriptions appearing in the SERPs (search engine results pages). The answer to this problem is data nosnippet.
She asked John about whether or not they can hide text from appearing in a SERP snippet.
John first explained what a snippet is. He said that their systems are programmed to attempt to describe how a page may be helpful to a user’s query.
He said that they focus on the meta description the majority of the time. Sometimes, they might show random text from the page.
While the displayed snippet is not a ranking factor, it’s possible that it could help users choose a specific result to click on, which can theoretically improve your CTR (click-through rate).
There are also some situations where you might not want to show things from the page. If you find Google is using the wrong snippet of text, you could wrap the text in a data-nosnippet tag.
This nosnippet tag can be applied to certain HTML elements. These include:
- span
- div
- section
When it’s applied, Google is going to know that it shouldn’t use any text from that particular element marked by data-nosnippet in the search results.
It won’t happen immediately, however. The page still needs to be recrawled and reprocessed for the snippet to be removed entirely.
John Mueller AskGooglebot Transcript
John 0:03
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of AskGooglebot. I’m here from the Google Search relations team to answer your questions about Google search. Our question today comes from Ariadna, and it’s about not showing some text in a snippet:
Taking a step back, the snippet is a short description shown per page in the search results.
Our systems try to describe how this particular page might be helpful for the user’s query. We may show different texts depending on what was searched for. Usually, we focus on the description meta tag, and sometimes we use text from the page too. The snippet shown is not a ranking factor.
However, it can help users to choose which result to click on so it’s kind of worth double checking. In some situations, you might not want to show specific things from the page itself. That might be dynamic content, or just something you’d prefer only to show in the context of your own page.
Recently, we introduced a way to let us know about text you’d like to exclude. It’s called the data- no snippet attribute. You can apply this to specific HTML elements, and we’ll then know not to show that text within the snippet. We have to recrawl and reprocess the page to find that, so it won’t be immediately changed.
There’s more about this attribute as well as about other meta tags to control snippets in our search developers documentation, which is linked in the description. And that’s it for this time. I hope you found this useful and insightful. See you on the next episode of AskGooglebot and don’t forget to subscribe to see the next episodes.
