The last 3 months have heralded a bevy of new tests and features from Google's search results, and it's worth taking a review of the most frequent of these and examining what it potentially holds for optimization of the future.
The new results types include:
Growth of Rich Text Snippets
Perhaps the most obvious and well-covered, rich text snippets enable certain sites to provide Google with extra "structured" information about their pages and receive data callouts in several formats inside Google's results.
BTW - Notice how Hulu's rich snippets aren't quite as "rich" as YouTube's? I'm not entirely sure why that is, as Hulu does feature star review numbers just like YouTube.
Internal Anchor Links
Google's been recognizing use of the hash tag (#) in URLs and has taken a new approach of showing these embedded anchor links right in the SERPs as separate callouts.
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This last Gmail result is among the more recent changes Google's shown with the "jump to" feature embedded inside the snippet (rather than below it).
Page-Specific Sitelinks
Domains have, for a long time, been able to achieve "sitelink" status, whereby important subpages are listed below the main URL, taking up a significant portion of a SERPs' real estate. Now, Google is offering a similar, though slightly less spacious, piece of real estate to sub-pages on individual internal pages.
Embedded Vertical Results
Several forms of this feature have received mainstream coverage, but the use of embedding vertical data and links, typically with the "+" link, has grown in recent months to encompass data of all kinds.
Multi-Page Article Results
One of the least reported (at least in my brief survey of blog posts) effects, this rich snippet format can have a dramatic effect on the vertical space devoted to a listing. It shows for certain types of forum threads & articles where multiple pages are (in Google's eyes) relevant to the search query.
What Does this Portend for SEO?
- Smart, valuable internal anchors may be a good way to get more visibility in the SERPs
- Attaching vertical data or vertical connections to URLs can earn more visibility (but Google may also take those clicks away as they lead back to other Google properties such as Maps, Finance, etc.)
- Earning authority to individual internal pages may be a valuable tactic to receive greater eyeball activity in the results (even if your page's don't rank #1)
- Multiple authors and pages on blog/forum style content can attract greater SERPs real estate
I'd love to hear other new kinds of SERPs you've been seeing and the impact you perceive on the practices of SEO and content creation.
I noticed the "X posts - Y Authors - Last post:" snippet just yesterday. It seems like semantic markup is going to continue becoming more important for SEO.
Another example is Facebook profiles. The result for mine includes my hometown and the names of several of my friends.
If you haven't seen it already, Google released a beta version of a Rich Snippets Testing Tool in Webmaster Tools.
Cool find, thanks!
Good roundup of a flurry of testing and changes we're seeing of late from Google. Two more that I'd say are worthy of including on this list are:
On a slightly separate point I think we can all learn from Google's way of testing is how they tweak tiny changes, test their effectiveness, rinse and repeat - rather than making a huge change all at once. I think many sites could benefit from the same approach - a few small changes a month rather than blowing a huge budget on a complete redesign every few years.
I'm getting amazed by how quickly Google is now picking up it's results. I posted an article the other day, and on another computer without my personalised results, within ten minutes it was appearing at #1!
I think Google are going to shift into the real-time syndicates soon.
i know i use blogger and im getting indexed almost as fast as i post
Hi Rand,
Great post.
Something you have missed on this is Google testing breadcrumb links with results, about 4 weeks ago on Google UK they were including breadcrumb trails just above the green URL, so if a certain page was 3 levels deep in a site they would include all of these breadcrumb links.
Also with the URL that's displayed with the results, they were made shorter just to the main domain (i.e www.yourwebsite.com) and notdisplaying the full URL.
So in the long run if your ranked well and have a breadcrumb on your site you could be getting 4 links for the price of one!
I for instance promote its site an article, on my glance this on given moment the most best way.
ah yes! forgot about breadcrumbs - here's an example:
https://www.seoaddicted.com/google/google-testing-breadcrumb-trail-in-serp-results/
Rand,
I don't see that Hulu has included any kind of markup to identify their star ratings. At minimum, to get the star rating in the snippet, you have to include alt text on the star images -- something that Hulu has not implemented.
From the Google docs:
"If your site uses an image to indicate a rating, you should add class="rating" to the image tag. Google will extract the rating from the alt text"
I have sometimes seen a site get rating snippets without the class="rating" addition, but never without the alt text on the stars. Hulu needs to get with the program here:)
I recently wrote a post about getting rich snippets if you're interested.
Very nice post, Rand
I've tried few keywords on google.co.uk, like "seo tools"
Here is the image, https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2568/3919143174_a7016d3799.jpg (hopefully it's working)
As indicated in the image, seochat took two position out of top 3, and it has a snippet of "show more results from www.seochat.com". If you click on that, it will show another 6 more urls. 8 links on first page(top8), dominated!
Seochat offers loads of valuable tools for free, so I guess the more valuable internal pages you have, the more likelihood you will get few of them shown in the snippet.
Nice post Rand.
I actually think that the development which is of most interest/will have biggest impact on brands is also the one that SEOs can probably do the least about: the use of ratings, etc... in the snippets.
If you believe, as I do, that the SERPs are now a brand's true homepage (just look at the huge numbers using Google for navigational searches/typing in URLs), then having ten thumbs down next to your product in a review site's snippet, right there on the 1st page, can't be good.
But of course there's really very little that we as marketers can do about this, other than work to push these results off page 1, as the only thing that will really change this thing is deep changes within a brand, its products & its customer service, and there isn't a meta tag for that.
The multi-page article results are the most interesting to me. In the Health Care Plan example, it appears that multiple pages from the same article are listed. Are multiple pages relevant to the search query? Not when the title tag fails to describe the content of the page, IMO.
On the other hand, rather than applying the noindex,follow or canonical tag directive to pages beyond the first of a multi-page piece, it may be time to rethink strategies to obtain a greater share of the SERP.
I think a lot of content management systems force the same Title tag on multi-page articles, so they have a tough time ranking on their own. Additionally, a lot of readers don't click through to the later pages, so it's hard to get traffic to them. Anything the SEs can do to help in this area is great, although againg, if they carry the same Title tag, what's the incentive to click through to ensuing pages even if they do show up in the SERPs.
I am really not sure if this is being done "quietly" by Google. Google has been very open about the rich snippets. The special sitelinks, well - they have been playing with UIs on that since they started.
I really like what Google is doing. It might be making our job as SEOs a little more difficult, but it's creating a better environment for users of the search engine itself.
I'm re-designing my site and I'm basing a lot of stuff on the new changes Google is making to it's system to try and keep up to date a little better. Particularly stuff like it's support for hash tags, having a more solid navigation structure and more interesting content.
Hopefully it'll help me get more conversions on my website than before. Really starting to feel the crunch now.
Great article!
By the way - its not just Google that is hyperlinking to internal anchor links via the # tag https://twurl.nl/xo6iol (see wikipedia results)
Good point Rishi - I believe Yahoo were actually the first ones to do this... (back in March)
Bing is also showing these # links for the same query.
Now if only either of those sites had audiences (outside of the US) that made them worth Rand writing about.
;)
Yahoo! gets less sponsored on SERP, so more space for vertical and universal content ;-)
I noticed the internal site links a month or so back on one of my sites, which is great, and a few of the other ones I saw also.
Some I haven't noticed at all yet, so this was a great article to read.
Thank you
thanks Rand for those explanations. those + links can really make your site appear in full space on your screen, when opened. Great stuff!
Google's, been pretty tight about who they will work with as far as Rich snippets goes. If you think your site is authoratitve and contains information that would benefit Google search users. Google actually requires that you apply for rich snippets consideration and I explain how to do that here: https://bit.ly/LeHoG
It's also worth noting that Yahoo SearchMonkey has a much greater acceptance for rich snippets and and allows you to significantly enhance your search results. Now, we know that Bing will soon be replacing Yahoo's natural search results, but time will tell whether or not SearchMonkey tools may remain.
Certainly gives us SEOs a new realm to put our efforts into. When choosing a markup format to be the default for one's pages, is it advisable to use microformats or RDFa? While Google supports both, it seems to be that RDFa, although a little more complicated, is more flexible and all inclusive. Although right now most of the tags Google supports are available in both, as Google supports more and more of the tags, more options may be available in RDFa (note the webmaster blog post that neopunisher brought above about video tagging - that's only available in RDFa, not microformats).
What are your thoughts?
did anyone noticed that the length of some snippets can be up to 229 (caracters and space included)? did I miss something?
check out this result: here
I like the post - and gave myself a head smack for not noticing some of these things on my own.
The potential for breadcumbs and internal anchor links gets me psyched, because they're both good UA practices to help readers find what they want in a hurry, although I have to admit I'd largely abandoned the internal anchors over the past year or so.
Getting listings for breadcrum and internal links seems only logical though - since they are often keyword-rich anchor text anyway. Using internal anchors also allows you to link directly in from both internal and extenal links.
Interesting how the anchor text for page-specific site-links is chosen. Seems to be somewhat random as to whether it takes a portion of the page title, the page header, etc.
Thank you Rand. I'll look forward to seeing some real-life practical suggestions on how to optimize for these changes.
Metadata and other Microformats integration coming frontend from Google SERP !
Waiting for SEOMOz article on optimization to perform multipage and embedded vertical with editorial website ;-)
If who knows, advise.Have Organized on put the rating. Reytingovye references are of the form of www.my_site.ru/?from=1111, where 1111- number in rating.The Question. What do to Google considered the старницы www.my_site.ru/?from=1111 and www.my_site.ru one and same. The Contents beside them completely alike.Beforehand thank you.
Nice list again ^^. I noticed the new snippet-links a few days ago. All the variations are somewhat ugly when you see them on a single page in the serps, hu?
BTW - Notice how Hulu's rich snippets aren't quite as "rich" as YouTube's? I'm not entirely sure why that is, as Hulu does feature star review numbers just like YouTube. (Rand's comment)
The stars as we know are a symbol for quality and it is not a shock that this subtle but important symbol is only listed for Google's good friend YouTube. I would guess that even though Hulu's video appears first in the results that the stars carry enough weight with common searchers to cause YouTube's video to garnish more clicks. Just my thoughts on this topic—the world may never know.
Great information, but just curious if you think by having more space such as multiple authors for a blog post really makes a difference? I just do not see how that is important; however, with that said for a restaurant or movie/business review it seems priceless to have the Rich Text Snippet in there.
why the double post? i gave what i thought the answer was below before i read the comments [go down to read plz id like others thoughts :) ]
and just as a off topic note i can use rich editor with chrome
Last friday I ran into this search result in Google Netherlands: https://www.mobypicture.com/user/ruudkok/view/507180
To me it seams like the more vertical embedding that is taking place is favouring the bigger SEO players with bigger brands, The question is whats the correlation between the + sign that the bigger brands have next to their listings and the sponsored google adword campaigns that those brands have with google.
i think the reason hulu doesn't have the stars is they aren't using the micro formats (https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html) i dont see the markup on hulu videos or youtube but google owns youtube so im sure they are able to get to the rating data because they own it. unless i missed it does anybody see the markup in the source?
i just found this in my rss feed for google webmaster central it talks about getting videos to appear in google search results https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/supporting-facebook-share-and-rdfa-for.html
Hi,i am also in seo field.I want to know that how do google works,how do it gives the ranking for our site.
why google is doing this....I dont understand