How To Stop "Menu Link Text" From Showing In SE Results, Search engine shows my website top menu text.. Options

[claritydigital]

Hi all,

im new here, this is my first post and i hope y'all can help ) Anyway, ive just finished building a website and im starting to get indexed, my problem is, that the links at the top of my page i.e;

Links | About us | Contact us | Terms | FAQ | and so on and so forth

This text is showing up in my websites search results. They are links at the very top of every page, so they are showing up on every page indexed. is there a way to stop them from showing up in google and yahoo indexes? or is this just normal?

Thanks to anyone that offers help - it will be much appreciated!

Cheers!

Lea

[EGOL]

Do you have description meta tags? Sometimes they are used instead of words grabbed from the page.

[A.N.Onym]

Yup, I had the same problem too, until I enabled meta descriptions. Works like a charm.

[send2paul]

Off Topic

Hello Lea and welcome to Cre8asite

If you want to, come and say a few words about yourself in the Introduce Yourself forum, and maybe have chat in After Hours ?

Paul
aka send2paul
Crea8site Admin

[jaybong]

What SE's display depends on the keywords searched for - so if you have a lot of content that shouldn't happen too much (though a site:yoursite.com) might display the menu text.

You can also use the Yahoo no content tag. so that frames and menus will not get indexed, though it only works in Yahoo. I believe it reduced Yahoo traffic slightly when I put it on a large site, though it could have been an algo change or anything.

[Scottr]

I've found that if your Description tag is identical to your Title tag, then Google does not use the description in the second part of the search result. In this case it grabs some text from your web page such as the menu bar. Changing your description tag should fix the problem.

[rcjordan]

Write page items you don't want shown in serps in javascript.

[AbleReach]

Write page items you don't want shown in serps in javascript.

Except if it's important enough for top level nav you probably want it known by spiders in all their glory.

[rcjordan]

True. I use redundant navigation in that case. Top nav is written out with js, then the links I need are repeated down the page somewhere in html. But even then unwanted, even negative, twists of wording can appear that greatly diminish the likelihood of drawing the click. For the last few years, I tend to take care of site spidering with table of content pages, users and spiders alike do well with them and it only takes one link to direct them there.

[JohnMu]

Hi Lea and welcome to the forum!

I agree with the others, make sure you provide relevant descriptions in the description meta tag. Keep in mind that the snippet shown will vary based on the query the user makes. Using a site:-query can't be used to judge the quality of the snippets in general. Additionally, sometimes it just takes some time for the search engines to get to know your content better and to recognize common content which is possibly less relevant to the current page.

Hope it helps!
John

[DianeV]

Sorry, I didn't get that, John. Recognize common content?

[AbleReach]

Common content - repeated things like the same navigation links?

Unique titles and meta descriptions can help to give spiders something else to chew on.

[DianeV]

Ah, thanks Elizabeth.

[Evmikna]

Won't using CSS positioning placing the navigation below the content help?

[Ron Carnell]

Except for a few unusual instances, both Google and Yahoo create their snippets from the first text they find on a page that includes the searcher's query words. Make sure that's in your meta-description and you never have to worry about navigation appearing as a snippet.

No hoops necessary.

Here's a few earlier posts with more details.

[rustybrick]

Won't using CSS positioning placing the navigation below the content help?

Yup, that should also do the trick. Make sure your real content comes before your navigation, etc. in your source code.