How do I change my site's title and description?
Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. While we're unable to manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, please be assured that we're always working to make them as relevant as possible.
One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.
To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:
Code:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use the following:
Code:
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP">
If you use the robots meta tag for other directives, you can combine those. For instance:
Code:
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP, NOFOLLOW">
Note that once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear in the index.
If you're concerned about content in your title or snippet, you may want to double-check that this content doesn't appear on your site. If it does, changing it may affect your Google snippet after we next crawl your site. If it doesn't, try searching Google.com for the title or snippet enclosed in quotation marks. This will display pages on the web that refer to your site using this text. If you contact these webmasters to request that they change their information about your site, any changes to their sites will be recognized by our crawler after we next crawl their pages.
The "robots" tag is obeyed by many different web robots. To specify indexing restrictions only for googlebot, use "googlebot" in place of "robots". Example:
Code:
<meta name="googlebot" content="robots-terms" />
Googlebot obeys the noindex, nofollow, and noarchive Robots META Tag. If you place the tag in the head of your document, Google will obey the robots to not index, not follow, and/or not archive documents.
The
content="robots-terms" is a comma separated list used in the robots META tag for search engines that may contain one or more of the following keywords:
noindex,
nofollow and/or
noarchive.
noindex: Document will not be indexed by Googlebot.
nofollow: Internal and external links in the document will not be followed by Googlebot.
noarchive: Google will not archive a copy of the document (Google's Cached Page).
nosnippet: Google will not display snippets and will not archive a copy of the document. A snippet is a text excerpt from the returned result page that has all query terms in bold.
If this robots META tag is missing, or if there is no content, or the robot terms are not specified, then the robot terms will be assumed as "index, follow" (eg "all") which is the default for most major search engine spiders anyway.
Examples of the Googlebot robots META tagThe tags and their effects are:- The robots term of noindex will produce the following effect; Googlebot will retrieve the document, but it will not index the document.
Code:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" />
- nofollow will produce the following effect; Googlebot will not follow any links that are present on the page to other documents.
Code:
<meta name="googlebot" content="nofollow" />
- noarchive will produce the following effect; Google maintains a cache of all the documents that we fetch, to permit our users to access the content that we indexed (in the event that the original host of the content is inaccessible, or the content has changed). If you do not wish us to archive a document from your site, you can place this tag in the head of the document, and Google will not provide an archive copy for the document.
Code:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive" />
- You can also combine any or all of the robots terms into a single META robots tag for the Googlebot.
Code:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive, nofollow" />
Additional information on specific Googlebot Robots META Tags can be found at
Google's Web Crawler page and also at
Remove Content from Google's Index page.
Misinterpretation of the StandardsGooglebot's default indexing behavior is to index, follow or all. The below robots META tag is not required and not suggested in the Google guidelines which state that the use of the robots META tag is for restricting the indexing of content.
Code:
<meta name="googlebot" content="index, follow" />
When utilizing the above robots META tag, you are adding page weight that is not required. You shift the 'text to html ratio' when inserting the additional code within your documents.
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