Want to Hide Text From Google SERPs? Google Introduces New HTML Attributes

Do you want your page to show on the search results, but want to prevent certain text from showing? Well, now you can.
SIA Team
August 27, 2021

On August 26th, 2021, Google, on its Search Central Twitter channel, tweeted a question that they were asked.

Their answer came in the form of a video:

You’ve Seen Snippets Before

When you look at a search engine result, a snippet is the black text that’s under the blue links that denote each result. 

But, What If You Don’t Want Something Shown On Search?

That’s the whole trust of this news item. Well, now you have 3 options for this, and you can read Google’s official documentation here. These 3 options can be classified into 2 types: page- and text-level. 

Option #1 of 3: Robots Meta Tag (A Page-Level Option)

With this option, you simply place a robots meta tag in the <head> portion of the page.

Option #2 of 3: X-Robots Tag HTTP Header (A Page-Level Option)

This is where you place a tag in the HTTP header response option of a given URL. 

Option #3 of 3: X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header (A Text- or Sub-Page Option)

This is where you designate certain portions of an HTML page to not be in the search results. 

So, currently, those are your 3 for doing this. Keep in mind that Google will have to re-crawl your pages to see any changes you’ve made (and be sure you’ve coded them in properly). 

Hopefully, CMSs like WordPress will come up with updates (or hopefully, people will release plugins), that help people perform these changes without having to worry about code. 

Source: Google Search Central YouTube Channel