How to control your product information in Google search results

Posted by Edith MacLeod on 25 Aug, 2020
View comments SEO
Google details ways retailers can exercise greater control over how their product information appears in the search results.

Google product info.

In a blog post last week, Google outlined various mechanisms retailers can use to limit certain product data from being displayed on Google.

Retailers can make information about their products visible to searchers using schema.org markup or by submitting the information directly to Google Merchant Center

However, Google says it may also include content not submitted via those means when the content has been crawled and is related to retail, to ensure users see a wider product variety from a broad group of retailers.

In its blog post, Google recognized that retailers might want to exercise greater control over how their product info appears and outlined the following ways to do this, using robots meta tags and an HTML attribute.

No snippet

Use the nosnippet robots meta tag to stop any snippet being shown for the page in the search results.

This removes any textual, image and rich snippet for the page on Google and removes the page from any free listing experience.

No snippet.

 

Maximum snippet length

Specify the maximum snippet length to be displayed using the max-snippet meta tag. If the structured data (product name, description, price, availability etc) exceeds the maximum snippet length, the page will be removed from any free listing experience.

Max snippet length.

 

Maximum image preview

Set the maximum size of image to be shown using "none", "standard", or "large".

Maximum image preview.

 

Stop specific content from appearing in a snippet

Use the data-nosnippet HTML attribute to prevent a section of content being included in a snippet preview. Google notes that applied to relevant attributes for offers (price, availability, ratings, image) it removes the listing from any free listing experiences.

Data no snippet.

Google adds:

  • The above preferences do not apply to information supplied via schema.org markup on the page itself. The schema.org markup needs to be removed first, before these opt-out mechanisms can become active.
  • The opt-out preferences do not apply to product data submitted through Google Merchant Center, which offers specific mechanisms to opt-out products from appearing on surfaces across Google.

Google says display restrictions may prevent your product from being shown in rich results and other product results on Google, but do not affect the ranking of these pages in Search.

Recent articles

FTC bans fake reviews and testimonials
Posted by Edith MacLeod on 20 August 2024
Google Search ranking bug affecting large numbers of results
Posted by Edith MacLeod on 18 August 2024
Google releases August 2024 core update
Posted by Edith MacLeod on 16 August 2024
Google updates trending now report in Trends
Posted by Edith MacLeod on 13 August 2024
How to identify and avoid SEO vanity metrics
Posted by Syed Balkhi on 12 August 2024