I hope this is a bug …
When working in Google Webmaster Tools with our Discourse site, I noticed that Googlebot can’t see the introductory text that we’ve included in our global announcement banner. This text is basically similar to a meta description of what the site is and what it does, so it seems like the content should be included in the rendering that Google gets.
And if you go to the same page with JavaScript disabled, what do you see?
I guess its a legit feature req / bug… but do we really want to render it on all pages or just front page … I think front page is probably the correct thing to do here not to muddy up search results.
I’d agree with front page only. I can imagine this would help with the excerpts that appear in Google search results, too – rather than including topics from the home page crawl, it might display the content of the banner.
