A majority of my nodes are showing the following description in their search engine listings:

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialise correctly. ...

Strange because the meta description tags on my site (nodewords) are showing just the node textual content. Is there a way to prevent this from happening?

Thanks

Comments

Stuart Greenfield’s picture

Stuart Greenfield commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

That text is the text that gets inserted on the page prior to the JavaScript substitution being made, so to a search engine it appears as regular mark up on the page.

AFAIK there is no way to prevent just part of a page being indexed. You could change the default substitution text to an empty string on your settings page, but then users that can't see flash will see nothing where the content should be.

mstef’s picture

mstef commented

Then why would 1/2 of the nodes have the node text in the search engine description and 1/2 have that message? All nodes have meta descriptions automatically inserted (nodewords) so I don't see why any would have the flash error.

Stuart Greenfield’s picture

Stuart Greenfield commented

I'm not sure - I guess it depends how the search engine is interpreting the page.

I vaguely recall that someone once posted some source code that had the flash substitution text in the header - maybe sometimes nodewords puts it there? I don't know how nodewords works. However, the substitution text is just plain content, as far as a search system is concerned, so automatic indexers will treat it as such.

I think this is more of a search optimization issue - it's not an area I know very much about - sorry!