How to Avoid Improper Special Characters from Being Pulled into SERPs
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If you Google "Progressive careers," for the Progressive.com result you'll see a result where Google pulls in content from the page outside of the meta description (not uncommon) and also pulls in an in-page carrot that indicates a link. This character displays as a square on desktop / Android devices. The site includes this character as an accessibility best practice to indicate a link from a heading for screen readers.
On iPhones, that square shows up as a soccer ball emoji even though the entity code is different than our character's entity code (our entity code= , soccer ball entity code is
). Clearly, not the best experience. I know we cannot control what piece of the page is pulled in as the meta description, but does anyone have any tips to hide or help avoid pulling in that special character? -
Pretty sure you need this: https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag#data-nosnippet-attr . With "data-nosnippet" you can "designate textual parts of a HTML page not to be used as a snippet. This can be done on a HTML-element level with the data-nosnippet HTML attribute on span, div, and section elements"
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