How to prevent Google from displaying an excerpt on search results?

Hi,

Sometimes, when I do a search on Google, it displays a page excerpt like the following:

Is this something that Google does manually for certain sites or is it done algorithmically while displaying search results and is there a way to prevent that for my site? I mean, I don’t want Google to display such an excerpt from my site on the search results.

I heard about the nosnippet meta tag but I am not sure if it does what I want:

<meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">

Thanks for any ideas.

A quick search of Google webmaster help produced this:

nosnippet - Do not show a snippet in the search results for this page

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Thanks, just needed confirmation, maybe from those who used it, that the nosnippet meta tag would work for this case as I wouldn’t want to use something wrongly that might hurt my site’s search rankings unknowingly.

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Hi again. Sorry but after careful reading, I realized that the snippet that article is referring to is not what I am talking about. According to the following page:

The snippet is the regular text snippet that is displayed below the link on the results page. It’s discussed at this section of that post:



The thing that I want to prevent is the big preview that Google displays for the #1 link on the results page. I mean, I don’t want Google to display such a big preview of my pages like that.

If anyone has an idea how to prevent that while keeping the regular snippet, assuming it is not done manually by Google for certain sites, I will be happy to hear.

Ah, OK. I’ve never noticed that distinction before. (I’ve never paid that much attention to how the results are presented. )

It appears that is what Google calls a “featured snippet”, and the only way to opt out of it is by opting out of snippets altogether for that page.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en&ref_topic=4589289

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Thanks a lot, now that is a definitive answer, and it sucks not to be able to opt out of it while keeping the regular snippet active.

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