Search Efforts

How do i stop search engines from picking up different parts of my site, for its description?

Hello all, my title says it all. For some reason google picked up my content from the footer area, and used it as my site description? How can i stop major search engines from picking up content from diffrent parts of my site, to use as my site descripion? How can i make it so they only spider the descripion the site is optimized for? Google use to crawl my correct site descripion like a few weeks ago, but dont know what happend. Please help.

Public Comments

1. Post a link to your web site. My guess is it comes from how your site is layed out in HTML. The description you want to have should come towards the top.
2. i think the robots.txt file should do it.
3. Generally speaking, search engines will use the META description tag as your site description. If you do not provide that, the search engine will generally return whatever words it thinks are most important or prevalent, given the position of the text near the top of the page, the surrounding elements (e.g., H1 elements are more important than P elements), the nature of the text and the words it contains. If you don't want a page indexed, period, you can use a robots.txt file to prevent the file being indexed. However, this cannot work if you are including the file in other pages, such as a footer. If you want to exclude a specific portion of text on a page from being indexed, but want the page to be indexed, you can accomplish that by using AJAX. Save the part of your page HTML you don't want indexed as a text file. Then, use AJAX to set the innerHTML of a DIV on your page to be that text file's contents. Search engines cannot index DOM-manipulated content, so that would pretty much do the trick. I discuss making an AJAX call to static content here: http://www.dougv.com/blog/2007/04/04/displaying-static-random-html-and-images-on-a-web-page-via-ajax/