Undesired content from Stripe payment plugin getting indexed by Google, Bing etc

[zizzle]

Hi,

Just wanted to let the developers know that there is code in the Stripe Payment (free) plugin that is being indexed by Google and other search engines. There may be other similar type of content in the code that will be treated the same by Google as well.

We have Stripe payment buttons on various pages throughout the site. In the view source code each payment button contains the following code. The undesired content being indexed by Google is “Stripe Payments requires Javascript to be supported by the browser in order to operate”. We are seeing this appear when we search Google via site:ourwebsite.com and also just searching for “the website name” on Google. Google is including this text randomly in their descriptions under the page/post titles in their description area on the search results. See code below…

<div class="asp_product_buy_button"><div class="asp-processing-cont" style="display:none;"><span class="asp-processing">Processing <i>.</i><i>.</i><i>.</i></span></div><form id = 'asp_ng_form_XXXXXXXXXXXXXX' class='asp-stripe-form' action = '' METHOD = 'POST'> <input type='hidden' name='asp_product_id' value='XXX' /><div class="asp-child-hidden-fields" style="display: none !important;"></div></form><div id="asp-all-buttons-container-XXXXXXXXXXXXXX" class="asp_all_buttons_container"><div class="asp_product_buy_btn_container"><button id="asp_ng_button_XXXXXXXXXXXXXX" type="submit" class="asp_product_buy_btn blue"><span>Sign Up</span></button></div><noscript>Stripe Payments requires Javascript to be supported by the browser in order to operate.</noscript></div><div id="asp-btn-spinner-container-XXXXXXXXXXXXXX" class="asp-btn-spinner-container" style="display: none !important"><div class="asp-btn-spinner"><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div></div></div>

Can the developers provide a fix for this with a plugin update? Here are some links regarding the issue of keeping Google from indexing certain parts or elements of a website.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15685205/noindex-tag-for-google

https://perishablepress.com/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/

Please advise on a solution to fix this issue.

Thanks!

[Admin]

There is nothing wrong with this. That is just HTML code of the button. If you have buttons on a page, it can be indexed (if that page is indexed). There is no harm in that. Trying to massage or play around with the indexing is not wise. Search engines are super smart and they figure out what is really true content and not.

If you don’t want certain pages to be indexed, then just edit the page or post and use the SEO plugin to specify the page to have no-indexing.

Generally, it is not wise for our plugin to mess with indexing since that is the job of a SEO plugin. You should have a SEO plugin that can allow you to customize the SEO properties of a page (including description).

[zizzle]

Hi thanks for the info. I’m experienced with SEO and using Rankmath with this site. I am familiar with how to index/noindex follow/nofollow desired pages/posts, etc.

I didn’t mean to suggest it was a problem/bug, I just happened to notice depending on how you search for the site Google will bring up different description results even if you have thoroughly configured the site with SEO plugin with set page/post meta for titles/descriptions. Most of the time the SEO set title/descriptions are provided by Google, but sometimes Google will show that text in the descriptions on search results.

The only point I was making is that any element code containing the text “Stripe Payments requires Javascript to be supported by the browser in order to operate” could be identified to Google in any number of ways to indicate that this does not need to be indexed by Google. (just the element, not the page/post that the button is on).

That’s why I provided those links because they address this specific issue. For example,

https://perishablepress.com/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/

But I understand if you don’t want to fiddle with this as without thorough testing three is always the chance it could have unexpected or undesirable effects for plugin users. I just thought from reading about this issue that it would be fairly easy & straight forward to implement.

Perhaps I will try experimenting with variables within the <div class=”asp_product_buy_button”> to see if I can get Google to drop the text from search results.

Thanks

[Admin]

I understand. I would prefer to handle this using a filter hook potentially. We can add a new filter or action hook that you can use to add the desired no-index parameters to your site. This will ensure that there cannot be any unexpected result on a lot of other sites that doesn’t want it.

You can suggest a hook that will help you do this for your site. You can also create a pull request on the Stripe plugin’s repository:
https://github.com/Arsenal21/stripe-payments

[Author]

Posts