Google's Instant Previews and the "Red Box"

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

In looking over my site via Google's instant previews I noticed that a solid red box is placed around what Google feels is important and the box always starts at the beginning of the main content, above the title, and finishes after the second line of text within that article.

If an image appears above the article the red preview box stretches below the image until it reaches text.

I could find a single preview in which the box was elsewhere on the page. ie: sidebar, footer, header etc.

I couldn't find a single preview in which the box was started below the second line of text in any article.

Does this mean I get two lines to spout off the pages top keywords before I lose keyword value? It makes sense that you're going to mention an articles subject at the start of an article but, since we're dealing with a bot, does this mean we should do so intentionally without exception?

Does it mean we should only bother using bold around our top keywords for a given page within the first two lines?

I know we're supposed to write for humans but Google uses a bot to evaluate and the instant previews suggest that the first two lines are prime real estate so... does it mean anything?

[tedster]

It does seem to be a pretty regular pattern - and the red box seems to highlight the beginning of the regular content area 90% of the time or more.

I have one case where it tries to apparently highlight some show/hide text that is actually hidden in the preview version of the page. So the box surrounds the nearest text which is just a generic link that says "What's New?"

[Robert Charlton]

I've checked in several niches I've monitored where the pattern is different... small businesses where the sites are less hip to the conventions of good data presentation... and the red box and the highlighted text are in spots like the bottom half of the right column.

It's not where I would have put the text, and in fact these sites weren't ranking well six to eight months ago. They are doing well now, though, with basically no attempts to optimize... leading me to wonder whether Google is gradually using other signals to override traditional patterns of optimization.

[lucy24]

In looking over my site via Google's instant previews I noticed that a solid red box is placed around what Google feels is important and the box always starts at the beginning of the main content, above the title, and finishes after the second line of text within that article.

Or, for variety's sake, the box goes around the single most incomprehensible sentence at the end of the first header-delimited unit whose header contains part of the user's search string. With me so far?

I've been blocking Preview for a while, but this one must have been in their cache. Saw it while snooping on one of those "This isn't the page you're looking for" search strings-- which, in this case, should have been made abundantly obvious by the Preview, even without the red box.

Search string: {longish phrase} cartoon
Page title: similar to longish phrase
First thing on page: "Pointless and Nasty Political Cartoon" which has nothing to do with title of page.
Immediately following header: same as page title

Preview: Top of page, including thumbnail of cartoon; distinctive g### indentures; more text.
Red box: Very last paragraph of this second section, namely "Pay dirt. Just don’t ask me what kind of ore they expect to find in -nngijjuk." * And, to further confuse the viewer, the black enlargement leaves off the words "Pay dirt". Not one word of this sentence-- not even a stopword-- occurs in the search string.

IANMTU.

Maybe I should unblock Preview. It's utterly useless and gives no feedback-- that is, neither logs nor gwt tell you which searches result in a Preview, and actual visits following Preview don't tell you the original search string and don't say there was a Preview involved. But the Previews are awfully cute.

!
Recently I've been seeing the occasional cryptic "google.com"-- no query-- as referer. That doesn't mean "via preview" does it?


* The result of adding the imperative ending -guk to the all-purpose verb-negator -nngit- . "Ore" is, itself, a gratuitously nasty political comment which becomes doubly unintelligible if you leave out the preceding two words.