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How are these search engines picking up this specific text to display under the serps? On my forum its picking up all the garbage text at the top of the page first and no text from the topic at all.
For those pages I have a meta description tag in, it works fine.
Anyone know how WebmasterWorld does it?
How does WebmasterWorld gets its meta description field as the indexed serp text?
This text will appear in the serps.
What you are seeing is exactly what you entered when posting the topic which is the title and description. Your topic title is the <title> element and the short description you entered under the title is usually the content to get indexed first. It doesn't have to appear in a META description element. As long as it is at the top of the code behind the scenes, there is a good chance it will appear in it's entirety when doing site: searches, etc.
<title>How does WebmasterWorld gets its meta description field as the indexed serp text?</title>
<snippet>This text will appear in the serps.</snippet>Typically the starting topic and then the first few replies afterwards will dictate the "meaning" of the page. If the topic stays on course, the page will rank highly for whatever is in the title.
Notice how I repeated the title of this topic in my reply? That should pretty much lock this topic into a theme. You have total control over the destiny of your posts. ;)
<added> Oh, but wait, now I see what you are referring to. Hey Brett, care to share that with us?
Id love to know the trick so I dont have to hack apart my IBF like I have been doing all day.
<meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet"
Jim
It saves about 10 gig a month in bandwidth. It also is a processor intensive set of routines.
In fact, I thought it was such a no-no that I would have never even contemplated what I think you are suggesting, displaying different content based on whether the user will/will not accept cookies.
I am always amazed at how much I learn here in just 2 minutes browing the threads (I do realize that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing).
Remember there are many people who do not accept cookies these days for security reasons.
Huh!? I doubt you could find a alexa top 250 site that doesn't display content conditionally. I would bet out of the top 1k alexa sites 80% show content conditionally. The only reason the other 20% don't is they don't have the tech resources to do so. Geo targetting, Geolang, Psychographic profiles, bot busting, and regular customer delivery is still pretty technical stuff.
> Remember there are many people who do not accept cookies these days for security reasons.
Less than 9 in 1000 here - and 8 of those 9 are bots.
> displaying different content based on whether the user will/will not accept cookies.
Absolutly. How you walk through a site and the sites reaction to that (aka: amazon like) can make the difference between $10k a month and $100k a month.
The only time you will get into trouble with search engines over cloaking, is when you are presenting radically different content. If you are merely adjusting things like targetting (giving folks in Utah ads for salt lake city homes vs homes in london england), or only giving meta tags to bots - I have never heard of an SE that had an issue with either. However, if you are doing what bmw recently did - that is a whole different proposition.
