meta tags and robots

[cra992]

can you have a meta tag tell a search engine to index only part of the page because on my site only the menu is being shown when you search for it http://www.nnrotary.org is the website please help if you can
thanks
-chuck

[felgall]

A page is either listed or it is not. How can a page be partly listed. You can choose to only have some pages on your site listed. The robots.txt file is the best way to specify which should be skipped by which search engines.

[Pennimus]

You mean in the description of the site in the search engine rankings, right? Specifically MSN, as the only search engine I could find any of your pages indexed in.

Well, you can't explicitly control what is shown by any search engine, although there are various ways you can try and nudge them in the correct direction. Unfortunately, designating specific parts of a page as non-indexable is not one of those. Mind you, doing that to your menu would be a bad idea anyway as you definately want spiders to index your navigation.

You might consider some or all of the following :

1. Write better meta descriptions, which can be picked up if relevant to the content on the site.
2. Move your menu to the bottom of the source code, and position it via CSS. This will mean search engines will hit your written content first.

Actually I thought I'd have more than that to offer you but to be honest this is not something I've ever come across before. Weird.

If you're really desperate to put across the right image in the SERPS, make the navigation graphic based. However, from an SEO perspective this comes highly unrecommended.

Regards,
Adam

[cra992]

thanks very much for all you help
-chuck