Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
More and better search refinements
Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).
Longer snippets
When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page. Below are a couple of examples.
regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet
Interesting, will they take that snippet from the meta description? Should we rethink the character limitation of 140?
Longer snippets could mean less click throughs if the user is able to get the info they are searching for from the snippet.
some of the sentences in which one of the words is written are broken up with ellipses; others are complete sentences, but i am sure the complete sentence will persuade a user to want to know more information not covered in the sentence or queried keywords. the snippet length is limited to about 4 lines.
I think they may have been testing this since sometime last week.
Should we rethink the character limitation of 140?
I don't think there was ever a limitation on the meta description. It is recommended that you keep it to 255 characters or less. I use meta descriptions that easily fall into the 200 character mark. As long as the most important stuff is in the first 140/160, you're good to go.
I think the Longer Snippets are a great feature. And yes, I also think that there will be less click-throughs for some sites. < Those who fail to optimize the areas that Google is extracting the Snippet from.
We know Google use meta descriptions in many instances. Maybe it is time to stop listening to all the SEOs out there who say that this meta description is of little value. As of this moment, it just became a very important element in the new Snippet equation. Not to mention site structure when viewing source. What exactly do you have sitting right after that <body> element?
I don't think there was ever a limitation on the meta description.
Yes, no limitation on the size of what you can write, but they only display 140 characters including spaces.
Maybe it is time to stop listening to all the SEOs out there who say that this meta description is of little value.
It’s always had huge value; the trick is in controlling what gets displayed.
I also think that there will be less click-throughs for some sites.
maybe; but seeing a complete sentence with both words queried invites me to click into a search result for info of which i didn't even think.
However, I don't remember any widespread touting in this forum that it was and/or is of little or no value - not at anytime in the last quite-a-few years.
The title and meta description are both critically important. It is the keywords tag that hasn't been all that useful so far this century.
It’s always had huge value; the trick is in controlling what gets displayed.
That would be the key right there and my experience shows me that you have a lot of control in this area. Don't leave it up to the SEs to generate Snippets if you can help it. IPW descriptions and front loaded pages will have a major influence on those 2, 3 or 4 lines of snippet showing.
Whenever I see snippet challenges for websites, first thing I do is view source. 10 out of 10 times the content after the <body> element is not focused and the SEs have a difficult time digging deeper (further down in source) into content to generate snippets. That means if your targeted phrase is appearing in navigation that is first in source, guess what the snippet is going to look like? :(
New Google Search Options: Sort SERPs by recency, page type, wonder wheel, or timeline
[webmasterworld.com...]
I hope it's not being suggested that we engineer our pages so that the snippet appears unatuarly (code wise) immediately below the <body> statement?
Nope, Google defintely are not THAT stupid. Yes there will be ways to influence (not control) what appears in the snippets, but not by positioning selected words just after the body statement.
I have been trying to do this for some time, but now that Google will be steering users to particular related phrases, a growing percentage of consumers will be more likely to pick one from the list and less likely to enter their own related phrase manually as they refine their searches.
It will be interesting to see which related phrases Google comes up with for particular searches. I wonder how closely they might coincide with the related keyword phrases displayed in Googe Insights ( [google.com...] ) for the last 30 or 90 days.
[edited by: tedster at 11:35 pm (utc) on Mar. 24, 2009]
[edit reason] make link clickable [/edit]
Anyway for us it doesn't matter as we were practicing it for many years :),
Maybe it is time to stop listening to all the SEOs out there who say that this meta description is of little value.
As for the new wonder wheel, bring it on too! I am so all over that.
Folks, for months and years you've read about SEO, dreamed SEO, talked SEO, tested SEO and felt the pain when it went wrong... All of these new features require you not only to learn even more but you had better have your basics down cold. I KNEW spending so much time learning and testing would pay off !
I'm actually excited with this, it's a whole new set of possibilities, kinda like someone finally took the training wheels off. Over 90% of the sites I visit can't even get a basic internal link structure down right so I imaging there will be some pain too for some.
Any word on when the sortable options will remain active ?
Can someone help me? That word semantics just doesn't mean the same to many people and I want to find out if you would classify this as a Semantic Search Rollout.
So, for eg, a page is exclusively hitting a keyword "apple".
One searcher is looking for "itunes". Another is looking for "cider".
The "apple" page will rank (albeit poorly) in one set of SERPs but not the other EVEN IF neither itunes nor cider appears on the page.
So, the "semantic rollout" would be covered with this refinement:
Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches
[emphasis mine]
There are also many instances where context is vital to 'understanding' the query/source data. A system that can understand "Many customers have dirty widgets, we offer a cleaning service for them." to match "widget cleaning" would be getting closer to the holy grail of semantic search.
As it stands, the related searches feature is just statistics - based on a lot of data. It's not rocket science - in fact I have created a system which does a pretty good job of doing the same thing (within the scope of Local Search), and testing shows that we give 'related searches' of a similar quality - so I'd say Google are not showing all of their cards here (as I'm not daft enough to think that 1 person can come up with a better feature than the combined data/resources of Google).
OBVIOUSLY backlinks and anchor text is going to 'help' in the categorisation. The point is Google will have pre-discovered list of associations independant of the backlink profile.
I suspect this semantic componant will tie in somewhere with google bombing (backlink association exists where semantic doesn't) and the OOP (statistically low co-occurance with semantically related concepts)
Also see...New Google Search Options: Sort SERPs by recency, page type, wonder wheel, or timeline
[webmasterworld.com...]Below are screen shots and a video.
[blogoscoped.com...]
(Let me put a specific URL here; seeing is believing.)
The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.
it just means that they are facilitating the sourcing of data. semantics is defined in a dictionary as related to different meanings of words; maybe their expanded suggestion list can be better classified as semantic refinements.
