Page 40 - Payout Magazine Online Volume 10.01

users. This will result in more clicks and traffic. The attribute is “data-nosnippet” and can
Snippets preview the content on your site,
showing that your site contains information
relevant to the user’s search query. It’s also
an indicator that Google finds this information
useful.
What Snippets Aren’t
By default, snippets don’t affect your search
rankings in Google or any other search engine.
The same still applies to this update. You’ll
have more control over how snippets are
generated and displayed in Google’s search
results, which can increase traffic and the
click-through rate to your site, but your overall
rankings will be unaffected.
How To Customize Your Snippets
There are three new robots meta tags for
customizing what’s displayed in your snippets
and how.
The “nosnippet” tag existed previously and
it’s used to exclude content from snippets. This
tag will basically disable snippets for your site
completely.
The first new tag is “max-snippet: number”.
This tag allows you to specify the maximum
length of the text in your snippet.
The “max-video-preview: number” tag
allows you to set the maximum length of your
snippet’s video preview.
Finally, the”max-image-preview: setting”
allows you to specify the max size of the
images used to preview your page. The
available settings are “none”, “standard”, and
“large”.
Keep in mind, all of these tags can be
combined and used simultaneously. For
example:
<meta name=”robots” content=”max-
snippet: 75, max-image-preview: standard”>
There’s also a new HTML attribute that
will take effect later this year. This attribute
gives webmasters the ability to specify and
target parts of a website they don’t want to be
displayed in snippets.
40 PAYOUTMAGAZINE
be added to spans, divs, and section elements
to prevent them from being displayed.
This is a good way of managing chunks of
content that you don’t want to be given away
in snippets. Say, for example, you have a page
that reviews products, and you don’t want to
give away the conclusion of your reviews. The
example markup would be:
<p><span data-nosnippet>The new iPad</
span> is, hands down, the best tablet for
productivity.</p>
So, if someone were searching “best
productivity tablet,” this attribute would prevent
the snippet from giving away the exact answer
in the search results.
Conclusion
Google has made it clear that these new
snippet settings are actual directives and not
hints. This means that Google will follow these
meta tags directly as they’re implemented by
webmasters, so take care when using them.
Also, keep in mind that, at the time of this
article’s publishing, other search engines aren’t
utilizing these tags. These settings will only
show up in Google search results.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there
will be no way to preview the effects of your
snippets other than waiting for the changes
to go live and propagate to the search results.
Once the changes are live, you can use the
URL inspection tool to speed up the crawling
process. Once Google crawls your site, you’ll
be able to view your snippet changes in love
search results.
The new robots meta tags will go live by the
end of October, so there’s still time to make
changes to your sites. Once the changes go
live, it could take a week for them to propagate
to all search results. The HTML attribute
will go live sometime before the end of the
year, though no specific time was given for
its launch. You can keep on eye on Google’s
Twitter account, @googlewmc, for updates
and announcements.