Nosnippet Tag

TL;DR

A Nosnippet Tag prevents search engines from showing a text, image or video snippet (a meta description) of a page in the search results, and prevents them from showing a cached copy of this page in their search results listings.

About the Nosnippet Tag

Nosnippet is a bot exclusion protocol that tells search engines not to show a snippet (description) under the SERP listing. Also, it will not show a cached link in the search results. So, the Nosnippet Tag includes the Noarchive Tag, but the Noarchive Tag doesn’t include the Nosnippet Tag. In other words, if a website has applied the Noarchive Tag, the copy of the page or website will not be cached in the search engine storage. But if the website has the Nosnippet Tag written in the code of the page, then the snippet of that page will not be available in the SERP and the page will not be cached by a search engine bot.

How to implement a Nosnippet Tag?

Implementing a Nosnippet Tag is an easy job for a webmaster. It can be done by adding the `nosnippet` tag to a webpage. This metatag should look like this:

<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet"> 

In this way, the search engine won’t show any snippet in the search results.

New types of metatags related to the Nosnippet Tag

Google announced in September 2019 that they have introduced new metatags that can be implemented by webmasters, giving them more control of how the snippet will appear in SERP. They could already control whether the snippet will be shown in SERP or not, but after the new changes, they can do more than that. 

They can control the length of the snippet, they can specify the dimensions of the image that will appear in SERP and they can also decide how much of a video snippet will be displayed.