Google spider

Hi, I’m not 100% sure that I know what you mean. When you say ‘on every screenshot Google makes’ which software are you referring to? Could you describe more about what is happening and what you would like to happen? Thanks

You are right I wasn’t specific enough.

First I mean Google Webmaster Tools while you use Data Highliter, you can see CI on your site screenshot. The same resides in Googles cache and that is not good.

While it wouldn’t be the major issue, the worst is, that when your site is not formatted the way Google likes it, it takes mostly first paragraph to compose snippet presented in search results. In such case, first sentence of snippet is always Cookie Info text what is very bad.

It looks like Google is not aware of EU cookie directive. It’s weird thing to believe though. For some reason they ignore it.

What I wanted to suggest is to make CI invisible for Google spider (i.e. you recognize browser agent and when it is spider you do not activate CI)

Hi,

I’ll have to have a think about this one as it’s not really something I get involved with very often.

I don’t think it’s doing your site any harm, maybe that it’s just a bit annoying. However- happy to admit I don’t know the definitive answer on this one right now.

Re: google search results snippet, you’re right that you need to format your site correctly using the Meta Description tag. Doing so is good practice anyway. There are a number of plugins that will do it for you e.g. All in One SEO, Yoast SEO.

Yes, you are right, that using proper mate description does the job.
I use Yoast SEO and even then to set it properly, especially on new site or when you launch test site without descriptions and Google gets it by chance, it grabs what there is and creates those nasty snippets. Then it requires a lot of work to remove them from Google directory.

I believe what I proposed does not need much coding. IMHO just testing agent string and deciding to display info or not.

Thanks anyway for this very flexible and easy to use plugin.

What’s the solution for this? Because it really kills the SEO…

Hi, I think saying it ‘kills’ the SEO is a bit strong, if you have misconfigured your site’s meta description then maybe the cookie text comes up- maybe not- but it hardly ‘kills’ anything. There are tens of thousands of websites using this plugin with no adverse effects on SEO what so ever, my own sites included.

However- there is a new version of the plugin coming very soon which lets you configure when and where the cookie law info bar is shown. More coming soon.

Eh well you’re right “kills” the SEO is a bit too strong. But it does kill the snippets when for example, in my woocommerce website products shown in google with the cookie message instead of the actual product meta description.

I *think* I solved it placing the cookie info bar at the bottom though, if that helps..

Thank you!

Thanks for the update. I’ll look into this, though this project obviously fits in around day job, family, life, etc so I can’t guarantee a date by when it all gets done. The new version is coming on slowly but surely! Cheers

@l3hworks
I agree with you. That was my idea behind starting this topic. It doesn’t harm SEO so much but does it indirectly through interfering with page snippet supplied by Google to end users. For sure they are less inclined to browse the page seeing something they do not understand covering your carefully designed front page.

BTW Great idea. Although temporary but does the job until update.

@richardashby
Thank you for this simple and flexible plugin. Take your time and enjoy it with family.

There is another concern that crossed my mind now.
It is possible, that hiding cookie info from spider, can have adverse effect on SEO ?? If Google is not aware of it, it can interpret such behavior as an attempt to manipulate page content in order to cheat SEO.
So maybe better idea is to move it to the bottom as l3hworks suggested?
What do you think?

I’ve been testing out a version with the cookie bar at the bottom. The issue will be compatibility- with 90k active installs any change will almost certainly result in support questions so I’ll need to test it with more themes than usual and probably offer a couple of options. That’s always the bit that takes time. Let’s see though. Thanks again for the feedback!

You guys are talking about the google webmasters structured data highlighter, right?
I’m not sure the way the site appears there is relevant, I would go to Google Webmasters => Crawl => Fetch as Google and check how the site appears there as there you can compare how Google sees your site and how a visitor sees your site.

@ovidiu
I understand your point but I already did my lesson. You can see result from your given place on this image from one of my sites. Both visitors and Google spiders can see cookie info on the top of the page content.

OK, in that case you have a valid point. I was just trying to make sure its all “right” ??

Lets see what the dev says.

Version 1.5 now works differently (the HTML is inserted into the page via wp_footer) so this shouldn’t be an issue anymore.