How to Avoid Improper Special Characters from Being Pulled into SERPs
-
If you Google "Progressive careers," for the Progressive.com result you'll see a result where Google pulls in content from the page outside of the meta description (not uncommon) and also pulls in an in-page carrot that indicates a link. This character displays as a square on desktop / Android devices. The site includes this character as an accessibility best practice to indicate a link from a heading for screen readers.
On iPhones, that square shows up as a soccer ball emoji even though the entity code is different than our character's entity code (our entity code= , soccer ball entity code is ). Clearly, not the best experience. I know we cannot control what piece of the page is pulled in as the meta description, but does anyone have any tips to hide or help avoid pulling in that special character?
-
Pretty sure you need this: https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag#data-nosnippet-attr . With "data-nosnippet" you can "designate textual parts of a HTML page not to be used as a snippet. This can be done on a HTML-element level with the data-nosnippet HTML attribute on span, div, and section elements"
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is this Interactive SERP Feature Called?
Hi Mozers, The interactive SERP feature that appears when you're searching for hotels nearby. It lets you input specific dates and number of adults and then lists different hotels nearby, their ratings and where they are located on a map. Two questions: What is that called? How do hotels get pulled in? Schema? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
301 re-direct affect on SERPS
Hi Moz Community, please can I hit you with a scenario and get your thoughts? We have a client site - clientsite.com - with reasonable rankings for some of our client's target search terms/branded terms. We have built language specific subdomains - it.clientsite.com, de.clientsite.com - which have been manually translated into local languages. These subdomains have robots 'noindex' as we only want to drive traffic to clientsite.com. We've installed a geo location tool on clientsite.com that 301s visitors to the appropriate subdomain, so content is served in their local language. clientsite.com will be the 'catch all' for locations where sub domains have not yet been created. If Google crawls clientsite.com and is 301ed to a sub domain, will we lose SERPS? The sub domains will have the same content (99% the same content anyway) as clientsite.com, but in local languages. Cheers guys. Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steviechat1 -
257 character meta description showing on Google?
Hi Guys, Noticed this recently, for the keyword "granny flat prices" on Google Australia. See screenshot: https://prnt.sc/fmp4is Any ideas why Google is showing a 257 character description like this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarolynSC0 -
Old URL that has been 301'd for months appearing in SERPs
We created a more keyword friendly url with dashes instead of underscores in December. That new URL is in Google's Index and has a few links to it naturally. The previous version of the URL (with underscores) continues to rear it's ugly head in the SERPs, though when you click on it you are 301'd to the new url. The 301 is implemented correctly and checked out on sites such as http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php. Has anyone else experienced such a thing? I understand that Google can use it's discretion on pages, title tags, canonicals, etc.... But I've never witnessed them continue to show an old url that has been 301'd to a new for months after discovery or randomly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
How to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues with Google?
We have 1000s of audio book titles at our Web store. Google's Panda de-valued our site some time ago because, I believe, of duplicate content. We get our descriptions from the publishers which means a good
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen
deal of our description pages are the same as the publishers = duplicate content according to Google. Although re-writing each description of the products we offer is a daunting, almost impossible task, I am thinking of re-writing publishers' descriptions using The Best Spinner software which allows me to replace some of the publishers' words with synonyms. I have re-written one audio book title's description resulting in 8% unique content from the original in 520 words. I did a CopyScape Check and it reported "65 duplicates." CopyScape appears to be reporting duplicates of words and phrases within sentences and paragraphs. I see very little duplicate content of full sentences
or paragraphs. Does anyone know whether Google's duplicate content algorithm is the same or similar to CopyScape's? How much of an audio book's description would I have to change to stay away from CopyScape's duplicate content algorithm? How much of an audio book's description would I have to change to stay away from Google's duplicate content algorithm?0 -
Google's serp
Hello Guys ! I will appreciate if you will share your thoughts re the situation i have. The homepage for one of my sites is one last page of google's serp, although internal pages are displayed in the top 10. 1. Why ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
2. What should I do to correct the situation with the homepage ? regards0 -
Internal Pages outranking homepage in SERPs
First of all I would like to stress that this relates to a new site which is just a few weeks old, however it is something that has regularly happened to a lot of our websites in the past, so I am wondering if there is some underlying problem. We have recently setup the domain www.calcioitaliashop.com. The domain name itself "calcio italia shop" is actually one of the main keywords we are targeting. However, when we enter this into google (we are using .co.uk version), a lot of the category pages appear, yet the root domain does not. Does this indicate some coding problem with the website? I thought we might have some robots problem, but running a site://www.calcioitaliashop.com command shows that the homepage is in the index, so I am just wondering what could be causing these results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
Htaccess funny characters
Hi Panda update,tickled, slapped and then punched us. I'm now weeding through crawl errors, one of them is http://www.flasharcadegamessite.com/26226-paper-airplane-flight.html">paper airplane flight I tried 301 this to it's proper page using Redirect 301 /26226-paper-airplane-flight.html">paper airplane flight http://www.flasharcadegamessite.com/26226-paper-airplane-flight.html but the server starts spitting out 500 errors. How does one add that rule into htaccess ? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0