Removing Google snippets?

[CWebguy]

Found this in Google Webmaster Center under the content removal section. Google even offers a special meta tag for this. Anyone care to explain?

[tedster]

A snippet is what some might call a description -- it's the text that appears under the linked title in the Google Search results.

Details are here:
[google.com...]

[CWebguy]

Isn't this what the Meta Description is for?

[tedster]

Not always - and definitely not on every query term. Sometimes a url will rank for a query term that is not in the meta description. in that case Google's algo might pick something else from the page. Sometimes the algo picks just part of a description and adds something from around the page. And sometimes the algo will plug in the description from the ODP.

There's an entire team at Google that focuses just on the snippet algo! It's a rather big deal, because user satisfaction with the search results depends on the snippet to a significant degree.

[CWebguy]

When I get overwhelmed by all that Google offers, they throw something else at me, lol. Still working on canonical urls ;) Thanks Ted.

[edited by: CWebguy at 8:43 pm (utc) on Mar. 9, 2009]