Assistive text in header and Google descriptions result

  • Hi all,

    My website is up and running (apart from a few minor glitches) and I’m currently trying to improve its ranking in search engines and the way is will be displayed in the search engine results.

    I’ve noticed that the result in Google shows the assistive text from the header and I would like to have that removed. I copied the header.php file to my child theme folder and removed the following lines:

    <h1 class="assistive-text"><?php _e( 'Menu', 'spun' ); ?></h1>
			<div class="assistive-text skip-link"><a href="#content" title="<?php esc_attr_e( 'Skip to content', 'spun' ); ?>"><?php _e( 'Skip to content', 'spun' ); ?></a></div>

    This seems to do the trick but I was wondering whether there is a way to keep the assistive text in the header without it showing up in the Google description of the site?

    Thanks!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Well, kinda.

    Start using a well coded SEO plugin. I personally recommend you WordPress SEO by Yoast.

    Thread Starter ShaiRoelud

    (@shairoelud)

    Thanks, that’s the plugin I’m currently using, but for some reason Google results reads:

    Craig Cameron Lab. Menu. Skip to content. Website about the members and research of the lab of Craig Cameron, PhD, at The Pennylvania State University.

    And I would like to get rid of the “Menu. Skip to content.” in the description.

    There might be two reasons:

    • Either Google didn’t crawled since you optimized you site with that plugin.
    • Google doesn’t always show that description, it’s dependent of the text depends on the query the user types.
    Thread Starter ShaiRoelud

    (@shairoelud)

    I’m pretty sure Google did crawl since I optimized my site (about a week ago), because it did change the description to the one I added with WordPress SEO. It looks like Google only adds the “Menu. Skip to content.” for the homepage description and not for the subpages.

    Thread Starter ShaiRoelud

    (@shairoelud)

    On a sidenote: the assistive text also seems to be the reason that there is a menu button in the mobile devices version of the website, which I would also like to get rid of.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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