This may not be the best section for this query; if so, I would appreciate a pointer in the right direction. But it does seem as if the issue is ultimately a design issue.
Basically, I’m trying to figure out how to get things like Google+'s link display to understand which part of a page is content. Presently, if I put a link into Google+ (or, for example, Hootsuite) such as http://www.westeros.org/GoT/News/Entry/Pixomondo_Lead_VFX_Vendors_for_Season_2/ , the “summary” Google+ (and Hootsuite, and perhaps others) spit out is the boiler plate “Game of Thrones is a site…” from the sidebar rather than the actual first few lines of the post content.
I know that I can include section targetting for AdSense purposes, and will be doing that, but I’m not sure if that works for these types of link displays. Is there something I can put in the div of the boiler plate that might get them to ignore it and focus on the actual blog content instead?
No, section targeting is specific to AdSense. It won’t make any difference in this case.
I’m not sure about Goolge +1, but most social networking sites, including Facebook, take the Description attribute as their default summary. This is also used in search engine results if it contains keywords that are relevant to the search. So it’s an important piece of text to focus on.
The Description attribute is part of a meta tag that appears in the page’s header. It looks something like this:
<meta name="description" content=" .... Your page description goes here ... ">
Thanks. I was hoping for something that isn’t a static description of the page since we’re talking blog posts. I guess without a description it just grabs the first piece of text?
Well, in the words of a well-known president of the USA, it depends what you mean by “it”.
With the social media sites (like Facebook), my guess is that, without a description, it won’t put anything there - just the page title (but I’m not sure about that).
In the case of search results, it will display a snippet of text from the page - or maybe several snippets - which between them contain at least some of the keywords in the search. If it can’t find any suitable text, it might well display the first couple of sentences.
By the way, as far as I know, most of the major blogging platforms allow you to create a Description meta tag. You’ll need to check the documentation to see how to do that.
But it does seem as if the issue is ultimately a design issue.