As a blog owner or webmaster, traffic from Google search is likely one of your largest sources. Google traffic to Pingable ranks 2nd only behind StumbleUpon traffic. So how can you control what content Google indexes, or how it displays your content search engine result pages (SERPs)?
Using the following Meta Tags you can control how Google displays your content, and what it displays. You use a meta tag by placing them in the head section of your HTML code.
- No Cache
<meta name=”googlebot” Content=”noarchive”> - Will stop Google caching your content. Google keeps a cache of your content, and a link to it is available in Google SERPs.
- No snippet
<meta name=”googlebot” Content=”nosnippet”> - Will stop Google displaying the short snippet of text beneath the title in SERPs.
- No index
<meta name=”googlebot” Content=”noindex”> - Will stop Google from displaying the page you include the tag on in their SERPs.
- No index Image
<meta name=”googlebot-image” Content=”noindex”> - Will stop Google form indexing an image.
- Setting an expiry date on your content.
<meta name=”googlebot” Content=”unavailable_after: 25-Dec-2007 12:00:00 EST”> - Will create an expiry date for your content, so it is not displayed after a certain date. Useful for excluding content in a paid members area.
Why stop Google showing some of your content?
Apart from the obvious scenario where you have commercial / or paid content that you don’t want shown, there is the important issue of duplicate content. A site is penalised filtered for having the same content on different pages, using the above meta tags you can control which pages are indexed and which are not and avoid displaying duplicate content.
Visibility of content
The visibility of your content, and how it’s displayed in Google SERPs is a key part of SEO that is often overlooked. Using the following meta tag you can tell Google what to display in the snippet for each page.
<meta name=”description” content=”informative description here”>
Controlling Meta tags in Wordpress
Headspace is a fantastic Wordpress plugin which makes life much easier dealing for different meta tags, keywords and descriptions in Wordpress. It enables you to have individual meta descriptions and keywords and much more for each page on your site.
16 Responses to “5 Ways To Control How Google Displays Your Content”
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I have never heard of the nosnippet, no index image and unavailable_after tags. Any proof that are having any effects and are actually doing what you say it does?
Thanks
The meta tags came from a Dan Crow article, he works for Google and specializes in Internet indexing and crawling, so I think we can assume they work.
I also haven’t heard of no snippet. Thanks for the info.
Very interesting but not quite understand how it works, especially No. 2 No snippet. I think I’ll just have to try it out and see the results. Thanks for the info anyway.
Very interesting and useful info
Sorry I can’t remember the meta tag but there is also one that can force Google to output your meta description in the search results rather than the description in DMOZ if you belong to the lucky ones who are included.
Nice pointers thanks, I might give some of them a try.
Yeah Google traffic is very important and knowing things like this could mean the difference of visibility or obscurity.
Thanks for sharing this here. Very informative blog. I will be a regular.
Thanks for the great info and blog! Didn’t know this could be done would be here regular
I only knew meta is used for description and content, but, ur explanation give me another used of meta tags
Thanks !
These will come in handy so google doesn’t index my admin login pages.
Thanks!
Great post… I didn’t know about the image one.
Cool.