What Is The Nosnippet Tag?

Date First Published: 17th November 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 6/10

Learn more about what the nosnippet tag is in this article.

Not to be confused with the data-nosnippet attribute.

The nosnippet tag is a meta tag used to instruct search engine bots to not show a snippet (description) under the search engine listing. It will also instruct search engines to not show a cached link in the search results or display a featured snippet that appears right at the top of the search results page. It is located in the head of the HTML document and prevents search engine bots from creating a featured and regular description of the page in the search results and creating a cached copy. Descriptions can be controlled on a page-by-page basis and it only applies to one specific URL. Web crawlers have to crawl pages in order to see the tag. An example of the nosnippet tag can be seen below:

Note:

Similar to the noindex tag instruction, in order for the nosnippet instruction to be effective, the page must not be blocked by the robots.txt file. If the web crawler is blocked by the robots.txt file or cannot access the page, the crawler won't see the nosnippet instruction and the snippet will appear under the search engine listing.

Note:

If the page a website owner is setting to nosnippet already has a snippet in the search results, it might take some time for the snippet to disappear from the search results as search engine bots will have to recrawl the page to see the nosnippet tag.

Why Would Website Owners Use The Nosnippet Tag?

Usually, search engine bots create a brief description of the page that can be seen below the search engine listing or it can be specified in the meta description. This is useful as it allows searchers to know more information about a page, but there are reasons why website owners would not want search engine bots to create a description. The types of pages that website owners may not want search engine bots to create a description for are:

• Pages with sensitive information that they don’t want search engine bots to create a description of under the search engine listing.
• Advertising they don’t want search engines to create a description of.

A common misconception is that the nosnippet tag only prevents Google and other search engines from showing a featured snippet in the search results. Featured snippets appear right at the top before the other search results. As suggested in the name of the tag, the nosnippet tag completely prevents a snippet of text from being shown in the search results at all. This includes the description below the individual search listings (meta description) and the featured snippets, so a page indexed with the nosnippet will just say 'No information is available for this page' under the Google search engine listing. The data-nosnippet HTML attribute is used to prevent specific parts of the text from being used in both regular and featured snippets, but not the whole page.