Widget text appears in search result for post
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My posts are showing up very high in the Google results for “recycled dad.” Unfortunately, the text that Google excerpts is not from the post; it’s from the text widget at the top right corner of the page. Anyone know how to prevent this widget text from being mistaken for post content?
Example:
[Google title/link, refers to my most recent post] Coming soon, or later, or never: the AMAZING FREE GUIDE « Recycled Dad
Aug 20, 2009 …
[Text below the link, taken from the widget at top right, which plugs a survey] Click here to answer eight quick questions about yourself to help paint a good high-level demographic picture of the modern recycled dad …
recycleddad.wordpress.com/…/coming-soon-or-later-or-never-the-amazing-free-guide/ – 4 hours ago – SimilarThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Google is so screwed up right now, don’t be surprised if your hat and shoe size ends up showing up. Seriously!
Until they get through rearranging the deck chairs on the HMS Google, we will all experience stuff like this.
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I don’t think Google is screwed up. What it comes down is that Google takes whatever text that comes first from your post, and most often that is the sidebar. It doesn’t mean that this is all Google reads, but this the text it uses to index or describe the post.
There is no way to prevent this on wordpress.com blogs. On self-hosted wordpress.org blogs you can add a post meta description which then becomes the text Google uses to index the post. It still reads the whole post, like above, but the description, or ‘label’ if you so wish, is nicer.
You can check the post descriptions on your blog by going to
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arecycleddad.wordpress.comThe meta description does not play a major role in whether you are found or not, but it makes the search result looks nicer, which in turn of course may be more enticing for the searcher, but you are not less visible on Google.
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Here is a sample of what defines the start of a POST in the HTML generated for a main blog page
<div id="post-922" class="post-922 post hentry category-wordpressing category-dot-com category-wordpress category-wordpress-dot-com p1 publish author-richard y2009 m08 d15 h01">
and here is what ends it</div>Nowhere between those two tags is any code for a sidebar included. Sidebars are defined separately below all the data for all the posts.
<div id="primary" class="sidebar">here is all the sidebar stuff and it ends with another div </div>The only way Google can pull sidebar information and put it into a description for a post is by screwing up, because that means they have pulled that information from a different div in the HTML.
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It does that with the text in the twitter widget too. Which isn’t all that bad if you twitter things related to your blog.
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@tsp
Technically you are right, but I still won’t say that Google is screwed up. The core of the issue, IMO, is that without a meta description Google just takes whatever else that it finds useful in order to index the post. I have no idea why Google pulls whatever it pulls, but without the meta, how is Google supposed to know what it is supposed to take?
That said, it does not matter (not really) for the search result showing up, it’s more a matter of ‘looks’ the way I see it.
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About a year ago, two of my posts ended up in Google with excerpts from completely separate blogs that I had not even read and had no affiliation with at all. I did a search for the text they said was in my blog posts, and found the other two blogs. I had no links to those blogs – no links at all in the two posts – and nowhere in my blog was there a link to those other two blogs, and their posts were on entirely different subjects.
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Now that really is screwed up. Speaking of which, oddly enough my wp.com previews while editing have begun turning up as ‘not found’ in Google Webmaster Tools.
But back to the OP. The issue above can be eliminated by adding keywords or a key description in the ‘Excerpt’ box below the post/page content:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Excerpt
Since the WordPress excerpt is similar in purpose to the META description of (X)HTML documents, excerpts can be used as meta descriptions too.Coming to think of, I remember doing this for some of my posts some time ago, and lo and behold, that is what showed in Google’s index.
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You know, I’ve set up about 40 blogs for people over the past year, and I’ve always included the meta description and meta keywords even though I knew that the search engines paid little attention to them anymore, and I’ve aired on the conservative side when doing so. All of the descriptions were carefully crafted and concise. In only about 6 of those has Google picked up the meta description for the blog and used it in descriptions in some of the search results.
The whole meta thing in my opinion is simply not needed anymore. It was so abused in the past – and even today – that the search engines simply do not much attention to it. The official google blog has no meta description or meta keywords. Matt Cutts’ (big Google person) blog has no meta description or keywords.
The thing with the post excerpt does work and I know of several people who use it somewhat successfully, but again, I’ve seen the excerpt ignored by search engines as well. I have a friend, who is a very good writer, and she include concise meta descriptions for each post, and only about a third of the time does google choose to use that description. Interestingly when they do decide to use it, she shows up on the first page of the google search results for categories/tags/keywords she used in the post. When they do not pick up her meta description, she ends up buried deep in the search results.
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Interestingly when they do decide to use it, she shows up on the first page of the google search results for categories/tags/keywords she used in the post.
Isn’t that how SEO is supposed to work in the first place? On the other hand, not being found for not using the meta description is a bit too extreme in the other direction. Bottom line: there’s no way to secondguess or manipulate Google. It’s does whatever it wants anyway. -
Wow, lots of help and discussion in such a short time. Thanks, all.
I decided to capitalize on the behavior I’m seeing now. I moved my “About” blurb into a text widget in that top right position to see if Google will grab that (plus the titles of my posts). If that’s what happens, it will probably help me get consistent good rankings. Worth a shot.
Arguably, that top right position is where the “About” stuff belongs anyway, right?
Thanks again.
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Husdal: Thanks for the tip about the excerpts. I should have followed an early hunch and tried that. Will do that for the next few posts and see the results. I really appreciate it.
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