When your web pages show up in the search engine result pages, what do people see? A list of snippets for each web pages are displayed in the search results as you can from the screenshot below.
What Is A Snippet?
When you do a search on Google, each result it give you starts with a title and is followed by a few lines of text. We call these a few lines of text a snippet. A snippet gives you an idea of what each page is about. To improve user experience, each snippet shows how the words of your query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold.
How Does Search Engines Construct A Snippet?
Usually search engines display the snippet of your web page by taking the content from meta description tag. At other times the search engines will choose to display portions of your web page content which contains words used in the search query. This helps people to see if your page is relevant to their search request.
If you’re listed in DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory, search engines might display the information about your site taken from DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory instead of your description meta tag. Another case is if Google sees duplicate description tags across different web page, it may choose to display DMOZ data instead of your actual tag data. The reason is Google consider user experience as a important factor and would like to display unique snippet or description tag across different web page.
Control Search Engines By Using NOODP & NOYDIR
Before you use this technique to control search engine’s behaviour, you should make sure you have unique meta description tag for each web page.
Once you have unique meta description tag, you can force search engines to ignore directory snippet by including a robots meta tag.
<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />The NOODP robots meta tag is fully supported by Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live Search.
If Yahoo! displays information take from Yahoo! Directory instead of your description name tag, you can force it by using robots meta tag below.
<meta name="robots" content="noydir" />You can also combine 2 robots meta tags above into a single tag.
<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir" />Another approach is you can specify instructions for each individual crawling robot.
If you only have the problem with Google, you can use this:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp" />If you only have the problem with Yahoo!, you can use this:
<meta name="slurp" content="noydir" />If you only have the problem with MSN, you can use this:
<meta name="msnbot" content="noodp" />Conclusion
Just take note it may take some time for search engines to make changes to their snippets once you have implemented the change. I hope the example above can solve your issue or prevent the issue to happen.
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Good article. This is a good strategy to ensure the you listing in the SERPs is as well-optimized as possible. In addition, this should make your listing more enticing as it will seem less generic and more focused towards the user.
Good idea for SEO. Thanks for the sharing.
Thanks Bey… I could not figure out what that meant forever… I had it on one of my sites and was wondering what it was there for. I wasn’t for sure if that caused a big surge of traffic my way last month in order for me to make 11,309.42 or not… My site has been climbing the rankings for some reason here lately. Can any SEO experts tell me why? I’ m not doing anything to it to make google like it. thanks… cya
Thanks for Sharing! definitely a useful tips in learning about SEO.