Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : SEO / SEM Discussions : Hide Text from Search Engines

[amex]

We have a flash website we are about to deploy. The site is implemented using SWFObject so if anyone does not have flash or javascript enabled, such as a Search Engine they will see Alternate Content instead of just the flash object that they can't read anyway.

We wanted to prepare for the few real humans that would reach this alternate content page and wrote on the very top something like: "Our interactive website requires javascript to be enabled and at least Flash version 8.0 installed."

That's exactly what we want to show on top to those who actually want to see the flash content and want to know what they need to do to enter. However, for any search engines we obviously would rather them look at the rest of the text on the page.

We want to know if there is a way to hide this header text from the search engines, "Our interactive website...." Why? Because in the website snippets or descriptions on Google or Yahoo we don't want it to first say "Our interactive..." we want it to just start describing our site. I think we could just accomplish that with meta tags but just wanted to be sure.

Thanks

[Atarim]

Use your <meta> tags (title, description) to do this.

[Rif Chia]

Use the meta description tag to write a snippet about your site.

[amex]

Thanks, I figured it was as simple as that.