How can I prevent Google from showing specific content in my search result description snippet?
 by Stephen Mahaney

How can I prevent Google from showing specific content in my search result description snippet?

  • I'm having a problem with Google showing dynamic content in my search results snippet that is less than optimum in terms of motivating users to click through to my site. Is there a way to prevent Google from showing specific phrases or blocks of text in my search result descriptions?

Answer:

Google's John Mueller answered this exact question a few months back in one of his #AskGoogleBot sessions.

According to John,

John Mueller Avatar ...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

To ensure you're properly using the data no snippet attribute, be sure to review the documentation which, among other useful pieces of info, provides these examples on exactly how to use the data nosnippet attribute...

This text can be shown in a snippet
<span data-nosnippet>and this part would not be shown</span>.

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