Cloaking?

[Morris77]

We have on the home page of our charity site a section called "recent donations" which pulls the most recent donations  from a database and displays them on the website via an asp write,  (equivalent of php echo) . Google is crawling these and  sometimes displays them in description tags  -- which looks really messy. Is there a way to hide this  content without it being considered cloaking?

[LesleyPaone]

I would use a user agent detect to block it. More than likely what you are talking about is a small insignifigant portion of the website and no one will be any the wiser. Also I would make sure that the meta description is set up properly.

[William.Lau]

I don't see a huge issue here if its changing. Cloaking would be providing something different then what an user is looking for.

I have a site that is extremely dynamic with new content being published all the time and purely white hat. This would not be considered cloaking. However, maybe it could have an indirect affect where bounce rates go up because the searcher didn't get what they were looking for.

To fix this as Lesley mentioned, you can easily just put a default meta description and it will never appear in the SERPs again...unless someone somehow specifically looks for those donation names/amounts.

[BeanstalkIM]

Question one might be - why is Google deciding that's the most important information on the page?  If you have a well-worded description tag and quality content, what is missing from what you're doing that this donations area is what they're grabbing onto?

Generally I've found that if the wrong information is being displayed as a description int he SERPs, it's generally a shortcoming in the description tag or content.

Assuming that's all working, heck you could use something as simple as an iframe to "hide" the content.  Technically Google can crawl iframe data but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts (whatever that means) that if you did this it certainly wouldn't show up in your description tag.  The perk to this being, it is kinda-crawlable so it's not "hidden".

[customerparadigm.com]

I agree with the others about using a description tag properly to avoid your donations showing up in the Meta Description for the page.  If you want to post a link to the site, I'd be happy to take a look at the page and see if there's a quick fix / work around for you...

Thanks,

• Jeff