Advanced SEO: How to Control Your Snippets In Google Search

[engine]

I see poorly configured entries in Google SERPs, and it often comes down to the individual sites' snippets, or lack of, or poorly configured snippets.

If you've spent a great deal of time achieving great ranking, but you're not capturing traffic because it's not appealing, or inadequately informative, you've wasted your investment in SEO.

Recently, Google's John Mueller created a video about how to control which parts of snippets appear in the SERPs [webmasterworld.com], which is helpful. "data-no snippet" is your control.

However, it's worth looking at the bigger picture of snippets, and how to maximize the opportunities.

As usual, google has some good documentation on the topic, and it's worth following to get it from the horses mouth, as it were.
The document includes creation of snippets, prevention and adjustment of snippet length, best practices for the creation of quality of meta descriptions, and manual and programmatic descriptions.

What more do you need to know?

Control your snippets in search results [developers.google.com]

[Broaster]

Is this done through Schema?

Is the rich snippets the description that shows in search under the article title?

[engine]

@Broaster
You can add structured data, and here's a starter on how it works [developers.google.com...]

You can also ensure you've got good quality meta description tags, and here's Google's best practice. [developers.google.com...]

Remember, you can only control what you allow Google to access, but you can't control what Google eventually chooses to use.

HTH

[aristotle]

Evidently the data-nosnippet tag can be used to prevent google's algorithm from extracting a search result snippet from specified portions of a page's visible content.

This leads me to think that for several of my sites I could employ this tag to block the badly-chosen snippets that google currently uses to describe some of my pages in its search results for important keywords. But if I do block google from using a particular badly-chosen snippet, then could this sometimes cause it to not show any snippet at all? Or possibly even hurt my page's ranking for that keyword?

[engine]

to block the badly-chosen snippets that google currently uses

If you can you identify where Google is picking that up from, you could do that, and experiment with placing alternatives.

[aristotle]

I had just started doing some specific searches to help me decide which article and which keyword to begin testing this data-nosnippet tag on. But on the very first search, the displayed snippet was a series of five different section headers drawn from different parts of the page. In other words, the final snippet was actually a combination of five shorter snippets.

For this particular search the final displayed snippet isn't especially "bad" from my perspective, but I could easily make a much better one myself.

Most of us must have already noticed that google's algorithm sometimes creates final search result snippets by combining several shorter snippets taken from different parts of a page. But I hadn't considered this when I made my previous post.

Anyway I'm starting to see that trying to use this tag to guide google's algorithm away from bad final snippets can in some cases become a very complicated process requiring great care.

[engine]

Good to know it's not as bad as initially thought.

I always believe in experimenting, by testing, and testing again.

I'd test the "data-no snippet" to see the result, and establish what works and what doesn't.

[aristotle]

I keep seeing more complications with this.

For instance, if you employ this tag to try to block google's algorithm from using a particular final snippet in the results for one important keyword, it could affect the snippets displayed for other important keywords in unpredictale ways. Even to work on improving the snippets for just one article could end up consuming a lot of time, especially if the currently-used final snippets are formed by combining shorter scattered snippets. To do a whole website could consume an enormous amout of time.

So I've decided to not pursue this matter any further, at least for now, since I believe that I can better spend my time on some other projects. There are some projevts that I thought of years ago but have never had a chance to even start working on.