How do I make Google stop reading my WP site this way?

[selena]

When I look at SERPs for keywords that I rank on for a WP site, the google site description snippet is showing stuff from my nav bar instead of content. Is there a way to make it so that information does not show?

[harvey]

Originally Posted by selena

When I look at SERPs for keywords that I rank on for a WP site, the google site description snippet is showing stuff from my nav bar instead of content. Is there a way to make it so that information does not show?

not that I know of. Furthermore, if you try to play games with what Google reads, you'll be fucked.

However, in the description you have a limit of words, so if you put content before sidebar you shouldn't have that issue. Also, using semantic coding should help, so be sure to use aside, nav and content tags. using the article tag should help as well

[Colmike9]

I'm not exactly sure about this, but whenever I make a navbar like this, Google doesn't include it's content in the snippets:

CSS:

    .topbar {
background-color: #000000;
height: 32px;
text-align: center;
font-size:14px;
color:#FFFFFF;
font-family:Verdana;
padding-top: 2px;
width: 100%;
position:fixed;
z-index:20;
left: 0px;
top: 0px;
}

HTML right before </body>:

<div class='topbar'>
<table align='center' width='75%'>
<tr>
<td align='left'>
stuff
</td><td align='right'>
more stuff
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>

[rowan]

Google's canned search server (a bright yellow box that sits in the company rack, crawling the intranet) allows you to put tags around stuff you want its crawler to ignore completely. Wish its Big Brother Googlebot recognised that on the big bad internets...

[Supz]

Originally Posted by rowan

Google's canned search server (a bright yellow box that sits in the company rack, crawling the intranet) allows you to put tags around stuff you want its crawler to ignore completely. Wish its Big Brother Googlebot recognised that on the big bad internets...

I actually had a client that was sent one of these for free from google. It just sat ontop of a file cabinet for years.

[borked]

Stick an h2 title with content after it and that content will show in the serp description

[Chris]

Use something like Yoast to control your social and seo description settings

[andre3350]

This might seem basic, but are you positive your using some kind of SEO plugin and have set up a meta description. Without a meta tag for description Google will just grab random content from your site and use that.

If youve changed it recently and its still not showing the proper description, ping the site and give it a little bit and google should reindex the site with correct data.

[geedub]

meta description. LOL at people who say it's worthless.

[fris]

yoast will give you a preview of what it will look like via the post screen

[selena]

To clarify a little:

I have the site set up so that there is no logo or header, and the SE reads the text site name and tagline first. Then it is reading stuff like "About", etc.

I am using yoast, and have been for a good while. I am nearly positive that I have set the meta description on it, but I'll double check that.

The theme is Prose from StudioPress.

Thanks for all the suggestions so far!