Wrong text indexed by SE

How to keep SE from displaying Breadcrumbs, Menu Links, Site Notes, etc

[ariet]

I base most of my sites on tables, but one of the problems I run into is that some text that is not really part of the main content gets displayed first in the search results.

An example:

Widgets International - premier supplier of high-quality widgets
Home > products > widgets Contact our customer support center Widgets International is the premier supplier of high-quality widgets to fire departments nationwide.

In this (fictitious) instance, the breadcrumbs are displayed first, followed by some text in a side bar, and finally the first lines of the main content on the page are shown.

How do I keep the SE from displaying breadcrumbs and the like?

[Brett_Tabke]

Well, they are matching to the text of the page. The only way you can control the excerpt is to redo the surounding text.

[avmgeo]

If you generate your pages dynamically on the server side you still have the option not to show the breadcrumbs when the SE robot comes to index your page, although this would potentially be considered cloacking.

Or change your layout: I once managed to work around this problem by embbeding my texts in a graphical toolbar with image maps, but the text was static and identical on every page, I must admit.

[ariet]

How do I detect SE robots? Is there a master list somewhere?

[avmgeo]

ariet, why not start with the Search Engine Spider Identification forum on this site

[webmasterworld.com...]

[ariet]

Thanks! (This site is so big it will take a while to find everything. Very good stuff, though.)

[Powdork]

Hello,
I use tables to achieve a liquid layout. I keep the nav bar along the left side of the screen in a layer. It doesn't affect the layout regardless of screen size and, since it's in a layer, I can put it at the bottom of the html code. The engines will usually return the first instance of a word (from the code) used in a search for the snippets. This may not apply to breadcrumbs since they are usually located in a place that would be affected by the changes in the liquid layout.