Exclude text from search results preview snippet? - seo

Question

I've implemented a "Skip to Content" link on my site and hidden it off screen (except when :focused). However, I've noticed on some pages where I haven't explicitly defined a meta description, Google picks up "Skip to Content" for its preview snippet in search results.
Is there a way to format or mark text that shouldn't be used in a search snippet? My case is a skip to content link, but I can imagine other similar needs. However, in this case, it must remain accessible (so no display:none, etc.).
I supposed what I'm looking for is some version of rel="nofollow" but for the next and not just the link.
tl;dr: "Skip to content" link appears in search snippets. That's not desired.

Answer 1

I don't think there is such a way for the general Google search.
Google allows customers of their Google Search Appliance and Google Mini products to state which content should be ignored for the search by using googleoff and googleon in HTML comments; see Excluding Unwanted Text from the Index. But this doesn't work for the public Google search, of course.
I think the bestway to try to prevent that problem would be to use a meta description: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812
<meta name="description" content="A description of the page" />

Answer 2

it must remain accessible (so no display:none, etc.)
Well, if you're OK with using JavaScript, you can still use style="display:none" in your div or span tag and add the following to your JS file:
$(document).ready(function() {
document.getElementById('skip').style.display = "block";
//Or shorter with jQuery
$('#skip').show(); //Alternatively: fadeIn()
});