Wrong snippet for your site?
Posted by John Honeck on March 19th, 2007
The snippet for a page is sometimes autogenerated by Google, sometimes the “description” you supply, and sometimes pulled from the Open Directory Project.
There isn’t much you can do about the autogenerated snippet. Google automatically configures a snippet that will, in their opinion, best show the bolded key words in context.
If a better snippet isn’t available, for example a blank site: command query, they will pull from the sites META description, you can modify this in your html code.
If you’ve tried to contact the DMOZ editor and found it abandoned, broke, or whatever their current excuse of the day is, you can direct search engines to not use the incorrect description from DMOZ.
On 7/13/06 Vanessa Fox covered, “more control over page snippets” on the now abandoned Sitemaps Blog.
The way we generate the descriptions (snippets) that appear under a page in the search results is completely automated. The process uses both the content on a page as well as references to it that appear on other sites.
One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project, or ODP. Some site owners want to be to able to request not using the ODP for generating snippets, and we’re happy to let you all know we’ve added support for this. All you have to do is add a meta tag to your pages.
To direct all search engines that support the meta tag not to use ODP information for the page’s description, use the following:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
Note that not all search engines may support this meta tag, so check with each for more information.
To direct Google specifically from using this information to describe a page, use the following:
<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
For more information, visit the webmaster help center.
Once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear. Once we’ve recrawled your pages and refreshed our index, you should see updated snippets.