SEO text formatting issue

Question

User-1526035670 posted

Hi

Will give a small description of a problem i am facing but more information can be provided if required.

My database is saving text from a HTML editor as below

<p>Hi </p>

I output this data on a webpage using the below Decoding

txtDetails.Text = Server.HtmlDecode(o.Details);

The webpage itself looks fine when viewing in any browser. I see the text Hi and thats it.

I now search google for this product. The title is fine however the text that appears below the blue google text is displaying 

p>Hi

So it displays a p> before the text Hi.

1. Is there something i could do to resolve this, i assume its to do with the encoding?
2. Whatever change i make could take days for it to update in google so if anyone knows of a quick way to test any resolutions, would greatly help.

Thanks

Answer 1

User409696431 posted

"The webpage itself looks fine when viewing in any browser. I see the text Hi and thats it."

What does the HTML code for that page look like near that output?  View the page source and see.

Answer 2

User-1330468790 posted

Hi JamieP1,

  

The encoding works well from database to webpages as '&lt;p&gt;Hi &lt;/p&gt;' to '<p>Hi</p>'.

Actually, the text is rendered as a html format in a html page but it does not mean the wrapper '<p></p>' disappears.

'<', '>' are common special characters. If you fetch the value directly from the page as a html formatted text, you will probably meet an encoding problem.

    

Could you please tell me how you use google to search for this product (as a string 'Hi')? 

If you are using a HttpWebRequest and append the 'product' as a query string, you might need to encode the text again using 

HttpServerUtility.UrlEncode, which URL-encodes a string and returns the encoded string.

 

Reference: 

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.ASP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding

 

Best regards,

Sean

Answer 3

User-1526035670 posted

Hi

Due to time constraints, i used a Regex query to strip the text from any formatting which seems to have resolved the issue for now.

I can post the code should anyone require.

Thanks for your help anyway.