Comments on: Unexpected Results Using NOSNIPPET

By: SEOAly

SEOAly — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:11:05 +0000

I’ll be sure to write a follow up post once I have some “news” to report regarding the use of nosnippet and whether or not it functions as I believe it should. We shall see! :)

By: Fred

Fred — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:45:15 +0000

Aly,

Thanks for the tip — I may use it! Look forward to seeing the results of your NOSNIPPET work, too.

Fred

By: SEOAly

SEOAly — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:23:13 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Fred. There is also a lesser known robots META tag called “noodp” that I have used with some limited success (or so it appears) in controlling the description shown in SERPs. It’s function is to prevent DMOZ from overriding the META description, but my understanding from reports of others who have tested the argument more extensively than I is that it only applies to the home page of the site.

By: Fred

Fred — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:54:03 +0000

Yeah, thanks for braving the seamy world of seldom used robots tags and the… well… whatever we can garner from this study :) Speaking of lack of control over how your results appear, one big pet peeve is when Google decides to show DMOZ listings over page title, META description, and even page snippets in the SERPs — this especially bugs me when the DMOZ entry hasn’t been updated in a while, due to factors far outside our control (e.g. the editor seems to have taken a permanent vacation, which is more the norm than the exception nowadays)

Fred

By: Columbus SEO

Columbus SEO — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:19:11 +0000

Hey Aly, I found your site on Sphinn... very cool article here, I'd never heard of NoSnippet. Thanks for putting this out there! Consider yourself sphunn. Best, Brad Columbus SEOs last blog post..Thank You, Google, For Making SEO More than a Boring IT Job.

By: SEOAly

SEOAly — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:44:00 +0000

I wondered that, too. All pages of SEOAly have been “nosnippet” for about 30 days…all subsequent blog posts were published “nosnippet” initially, so they’ve not been live a day without it.

I changed Welcome Home’s pages to “nosnippet” around the same time (when I installed the “Platinum SEO Pack” for WordPress). It didn’t take long for Google to update the individual page descriptions to the actual META descriptions after adding “nosnippet”, which is what led me to believe that I understood what it was for in the first place.

I just noticed the SEOAly issue the other day after checking to see what pages of the site were indexed. I just don’t get why some pages show META desc and others show nothing…doesn’t make sense.

I’m going to leave robots alone for the next 30-45 to see where everything ends up. Then I’ll pick just a few pages/posts to use “nosnippet” and see what happens. I’m a dumbass…that’s what I should have done in the first place, but I “thought I knew” what it was for! That’s what I get! ;)

By: Josh Garner

Josh Garner — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:28:36 +0000

How long did this test run for each of the sites? Though not a lot, it does take time for Google to update that stuff sometimes. Could be that the test wasn’t long enough. A thought.