Over the past few months, Google has been testing a redesign of both their overall SERP format and their AdWords blocks. In the past day or two, it appears that they've rolled these changes out to a large part of their audience. While we still have a chance to grab before and after versions of the SERPs, I thought it would be worth a quick stroll down memory lane and a look at the future of Google.
I. Basic search result
Let's start with a pretty basic search result, a query for [pygmalion]. Here's the before and after:
The title font in the new version is slightly bigger, and Google has done away with the underlining. Interestingly, the source URL is actually a little smaller. The snippet and mini-links seem to have remained the same.
II. Expanded site-links
Here's a #1 result with expanded site-links. The query is [carolina place mall]:
Like the main result, site-links are also getting the larger title font without underlines. This example also clearly shows that some title tags will get cut off with the new, larger font. This could impact click-through rates, so you may want to consider shorter titles going forward (at least for critical pages).
Notice the faint horizontal divider at the bottom. This sets the expanded #1 result apart from the rest of the SERP. These horizontal dividers are used frequently in the new design, and I strongly believe that they are a move toward a more card-like look (akin to mobile, Google+, and Google Now).
III. Image vertical results
This is what the new image vertical results look like. The query is [roger williams university]:
The new format has the new font, plus a fairly pronounced "More images…" link. Again, the vertical results are separated (above and below) by a horizontal divider. The images themselves appear to be formatted the same.
IV. News vertical results
Here's a query for [wtop traffic], showing the redesigned news vertical results. Note that these were captured on different days, so the actual articles have changed—the count/layout are equivalent, though:
All articles links are using the larger font (with the same implications for length/wrapping). Like image vertical results, news results get a top and bottom divider. In general, you can see that almost every type of result is taking up significantly more vertical space.
V. Local pack results
Here's a 3-pack of local results, for the query [lands end] and focused on San Diego, CA:
Larger font, no underlines, horizontal dividers—you know the drill. Note the lighter-gray text on the actual location information (address and phone).
VI. In-depth articles
Here's a look at Google's newest vertical, in-depth articles. The query is [palm oil]:
The redesign pretty much follows the pattern of the other verticals. Note that the actual header font—"In-depth articles"—is a bit smaller and slightly grayed out.
Google has been testing many variations of in-depth articles, and all of them suggest that this expanded format may be replaced with something more Spartan. Here's a recent test (this is not live, and this design will likely change), for the query [foreclosure]:
While this test format follows the rules of the redesign, it is in every other way dramatically different from Google's current treatment of in-depth articles. Note that this test version appeared in the "#2" slot (right after the first organic result), whereas current in-depth article blocks usually appear at or near the end of page 1. Expect in-depth articles to get a major overhaul in the next few months.
VII. Video thumbnails
In 2014, video results are really more of an enhancement than an actual vertical. Here's a quick before and after for the query [wild kratts]:
This is essentially just an organic result, with a bit of information and a thumbnail added—the general layout and thumbnail characteristics have remained the same. This also true of authorship results and review snippets—the title and URL fonts have changed, but the general layout, thumbnail size, etc. seem to all be the same.
VIII. AdWords (top)
On top of the general design change, Google has been testing a new AdWords format for months—these may be rolling out together, but the tests themselves have been separate. Here's a reasonably complex AdWords block from the top of a query for [keens]:
In addition to the larger, non-underlined titles and horizontal divider, the colored background is gone, and a yellow [Ad] box appears next to each individual ad. The "Ads related to…" text has been removed as well.
IX. AdWords (right)
The AdWords block in the right-hand column has also changed, but the difference is a bit less dramatic. Here's the same query ([keens]):
There's just one yellow [Ads] label for the entire block, and there's no change to the background (because the old version didn't have a colored background). The new fonts do expand the titles significantly and increase the vertical area of the total ad space.
Note that the AdWords block on the bottom of the left-hand column looks very similar to the redesigned top AdWords block. Other SERP elements, including the knowledge panel, answer boxes, paid shopping, and carousels seem to have been unaffected by the redesign (so far).
It's in the cards
Back in November, I predicted that Google would move toward a more card-like format in 2014. While my future SERP concepts were heavily influenced by mobile and Google Now and are more extreme than the currrent redesign, don't overlook the way Google is using dividers to separate out SERP elements. As mobile and tablet proliferate, and new devices like Glass come into play, Google wants to have SERPs that they can easily mix-and-match, providing whatever combination is most relevant for each device and situation. For now, desktop remains a fixed, two-column format, but Google's design decisions are being driven more and more by mobile devices, and the future is in individual information elements that can be easily rearranged.
To see this idea in action, here's a local (Chicago suburbs) search for [starbucks]. Notice how the dividers separate the expanded top ad, the expanded #1 result, a local 3-pack, a news box, and, finally, the rest of the organic results:
While a horizontal line might not seem like a big change, Google is clearly working to carve up the SERP into units that can potentially be mixed and matched. Also note where "#2" is on this page. As simple as they may seem, these design changes are redefining organic results.
Do you like it?
Trick question—no one cares. Sorry, that was a bit harsh, but here's the reality: Google has been testing this for months across what are probably millions of unique visitors. A few dozen marketers complaining about the new design is not going to sway their decision. At this point, the decision is 98% made, and it's made based on Google's goals and Google's data. The best you can do is try to assess how these changes impact your bottom line and adjust accordingly. Don't waste your time shouting at the wind.
One final note: While this redesign seems to be rolling out, Google has not officially confirmed the change and it may still be in testing (albeit widespread testing). I wanted to put together a post while we could still compare and contrast the before and after versions, but this design could still change over the next few days, weeks, or months.
Update: In the comments, Gaurav pointed out that Google's lead search designer, Jon Wiley, confirmed the roll-out yesterday on Google+. Looks like it is at least mostly official.
Title tags are a bit of a concern here, what should we be looking at now 50-55 characters to play it safe?
I created a screen shot here for one of my stories in 3 languages. English and Italian versions are ok but our German pages need a fix now.
https://twitter.com/InstantAtlas/status/444090635780239360/photo/1
David
It's tricky, since titles get cut off by physical/pixel width, not character count. I think there's a way we can collect this data at large scale. I'll try to sort that out ASAP.
Sure, I can see the challenge behind this. For me personally my marketing efforts for English speaking and German speaking content are on a equal par, with the German language being circa 1/3rd longer in length for the English equivalent using title length best practice is always a challenge.
As I can see with 'Paints-N-Design's' comments, making titles engaging/intelligible in German with such low pixel width is excruciating. We work in German public health, you can see the challenges when you are using words such as 'Gesundheitwesen'.
I won't event get started on our Russian content!
we really have to work on so many titles, because we want them to be displayed completely.
It was not such a big suprise, we all saw the design earlier and tried things out as fast as possible. Unfortunately in german we have so many long words like 'gesundheitswesen' in your case or take "SEO" what in german really often is searched as Suchmaschinenoptimierung. We have some lawyers as Clients and they are Rechtsanwahlt in german. When we first saw some of our client sites in the new Design we all are really pissed (scusi) and we started to work on the titles...
As a German myself. I agree with you Google has not been as kind to us.
Where we could in the United States say "airplane" in the fatherland we say "Flugzeug" not so bad but if our attorney friend who does search engine optimization
"pants and design"
Were to happen to have any client that sold "hospital equipment" that would be rough. As it would not be easy to fit "Krankenhausausrüstung" in ad words or a title tag
I feel like most legal and medical words get the worst end of the stick in Google.de when speaking Deutsch.
Overall though we have much longer words in many cases. I guess in Google as in life der Kugelschreibe (the Pen) is mightier than the sword and sometimes longer.
Hopefully in Google.de will make the appropriate changes I doubt they will but it would be nice.
Has any research or consideration been done around the interest in a user clicking through simply because they read the cutoff phrase… and want to at least see the end of the statement? I know I have done that, so I must not be the only one. Then since they clicked, they stay on the site? Similar to a leader snippet in a blog post. This could be a consideration for not shortening title tags.
I agree with you - although they are trying to encourage click through by minimizing the ULR - it almost is taking away the ability to click for brand and click for information - I think this might be a good move but time will tell.
Hi I agree that many people will be intrigued to click-through when they are curious about what...
...Just like that!
However when your dealing with a lot of internal staff and external PR agencies like I do you are telling them "Follow this format in your content creation - title word count =X etc." So for me it is a bit of a bigger picture as I'll now go back to our conten creators and inform them of these changes.
As Dr. Peter rightly states, them's the breaks, Google are not going to be bothered about a few huffy marketers who have just folded their arms in annoyance.
Ulimtately we just have to suck it up and get one with it really.
D
I recently read an article on "Title Tag" concern and it said that Google is now deciding upon the pixel size of the title tag instead of character limits. So I see this as a big shift in terms of search results. It depicted the title tag length preferred by Google as 512 pixels. Is this really happening Dr. Pete?
I also saw that here in germany - specially when you search for longer phrases whats not that unnormal in german - something like "internetagentur" and thats in the title - it fits in the old design, it doesn't in the new one.
German has many long words - when these words are bolded it doesn't fit in the results.
on many of our titles we had to go down to 50 letters (!!!) when the word was as long as "Internetagentur" or "notstromaggregate" and we wanted to see it bolded (we testet it before in opera was the new version visible much earlier here)
50 chars for title? Sometimes full company name is longer...
^^ depends on how much words the title has - "Rechtsanwalt für Familienrecht Dr. Peter Maier aus Berlin" is to long ;)
special when someone is searchin for Rechtsanwalt, Familienrecht or both. A pretty german problem - I am still on Title rewriting....
I find that I can submit a title with 60 characters. It all depends on the width of each character. I found a title tag generator tool on another article on Moz, and it's been extremely helpful!
What I don't understand is why Google arbitrarily appends the domain or site name to the title, without being asked to, then promptly cuts it off. Surely it should only add the site name if there's going to be room to fit it in? This can't be beyond their capabilities, surely?
Testing has been done! Google search result design officially live to everyone as Jon Wiley(Lead Designer for Google Search) said today!
https://plus.google.com/+JonWiley/posts/AuUAQCWJpki
I love how the first comment is: "i think i miss the lines" ;-)
Exactly Steve. It was too funny :)
Thank you - I missed that. I'll add a note (and hat tip) to the post.
It's my pleasure sir.
Imagine doing a tourist page for Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu.
(It's a real place in New Zealand, in case you were curious)...
Edit - NB:-I just Googled Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu and obviously the first result is for the Wikipedia entry - in the SERPs it shows the page title as "Untitled"...
The only portion which looks a little different to me (other than missing underlines) is ADWORDS one. Google tagged it with yellow Ad/s tag, which looks good and easy to differentiate from organic ones for a novice user as well.
I actually wonder that - with the missing coloured background - people might miss the fact that they're ads and click on them thinking that they're organic results, resulting in more moolah for G. After all, the bit saying "Ad" or "Ads" is quite small compaired to an all-encompassing big yellow box...
I agree the Ad tag a bit tiny... maybe the font color should be the same as the link (green) to give a better contrast.
Overall, though, I think the new layout is a lot cleaner, largely attributed to removal of the underlines on the links.
Agree with you, but again it depends upon person to person in different locations. Suppose if I talk about in Asian countries, you will hardly find people (apart from IT & online marketing field) who are actually aware of the fact that there are two types of listings on Google - Paid and Organic. That's why I said having a tag can give them a better idea.
I think the new design above all will convert better for the ad's as the drop shadow is now gone. This is good for adword dudes.
Not so much for the organic dudes.
-Chenzo
I agree. I think CTR's for the 1st position increase a bit even though that yellow ad image is next to the ad. Wonder if anyone proved it quantitatively yet.
Personally I think that old was way better than this new one. The underlined titles look good then without underlined titles. But I do like the design change for local pack results the (Address and Phone no.) looks nice in light color.
I also noticed this new change this morning too. Google shows “Google Search” and “I'm Feeling Lucky” buttons at the end of the keyword suggestions. You can see the screen shot here.
I actually think getting rid of the underlined page titles was a good move. The search results look a lot cleaner and a lot less "bulky" without them. The highlighted blue has always been enough for the eyes.
I also like the added yellow ad labels. Despite what some advertisers may feel about them, I think they attract people's eyes better than the faint background they used to have. But that's just my opinion.
Another subtle change so people don't concentrate on links ;)
/conspiracy
Hi Pete,
first a reminder for all the not-European mozzers: the yellow Ad annotation has been implemented also by Google also because the European Community ordered Google to make more understandable if a search snippet was an ad or not.
Second, in this Imag.ur you can find two snapshots I just took, and that present some interesting new things:
the first image is from searching "SEO" in Google.com with ?psw=0. I squared an extra information present in the in-depth article box, which says "Explore (whatever)". It's interesting, because it makes us suppose that Google categorizes in very granular categories the articles, quite probably using a concept based classification (aka: it's an Hummingbird signal).
On a secondary note, that SERP was strangely not showing any Images box, when it was usually present;
the second image is from searching "International SEO" and I did it logged in. My intention was checking if the Private Search annotations (see my post "A deep dive into Google MyAnswers") had changed. And it seems that also they changed too. I squared the "User X shared this on Google+", as it is now show clearly as a blue link: if you click on it, you will be sent to the Google+ post where User X shared the link. I think this is quite a big change.
A number of people are saying they're seeing less images, but I've seen no shift in features across our data set. I have a feeling that some SERPs just shuffled, which isn't atypical. We're probably just being more sensitive to it because other things changed. Hard to prove either way, but there's no sign of a major reduction in image results.
So the title tag goes from 65 to 57 characters. let's change ALL the checks in ALL the SEO tools :-/
Change is necessary as what today's user as well as search engine demands.
Shorter titles = worse. 70 characters is pretty crap as it is.
They never were really 70 characters. Titles since a long time are based on the pixels the characters occupy. For instance a 70 characters title using mostly i/e/l kind of characters were showing well, while 70 characters long title but with a lot of o/m/w et all were usually cut.
We'll need to get some research going on the new pixel width for the meta titles and descriptions. It'll be important to monitor the pages to ensure they're not being truncated.
Pixel width isn't exactly a useful data point when characters aren't uniform on pixel width themselves...
Maybe character count with normal letters and then character count with lots of wide letters.
An online tool that told you if your page title/description is too long pixel wise would be very handy
We created this tool to do exactly that a while ago but I think it may need updating in-light of Google's latest design changes.
Hurry up Paul ! :)
Sorry Nick looks like Dr Peter beat me too it.
Although I still haven't made up my mine on which is more important, having a longer title that helps you rank higher for longtail phrases vs a shorter title that will improve CTR.
I'm currently working on some tests and have seen rankings move from the 9th page onwards to the 1st & 2nd page just by adding in a few words after 70+ characters in the title e.g. "for sale". So Google clearly is still reading the information and using it as a ranking factor.
I'd love to see some big data on the different impacts on CTR vs search engine visibility!
Research is getting going :) Should have data soon.
*whispers* and those descriptions have quietly BEEN truncated, but nobody believes me when I say that...
like I wrote above we had to go down to 50 on titles with our long german words :)
gianluca I think he knew that it was a width not a letter count in the titles ;)
I know - but I'm simplifying. Shorter titles make it hard to communicate anything effectively so you're stuck doing terrible titles.
"MyPhoto Studio: Wedding and portrait photographers in Syracuse New York"
"MyPhoto Studio: Syracuse wedding & portrait photographers"
"Syracuse wedding photography, portrait photographers"
I can play the game all day but it's less helpful to end users.
It is more Advisable To keep your targeted long phrase keyword as Title
Interesting how they now truncate the page title mid-word (e.g. "Entertai..." in example II). Didn't realise they did that. I wonder if this is new, coinciding with the redesign...
Google must realise that websites maximise the characters in there page title, and as the redesign offers fewer characters, they compensated to allow websites time to change their page titles not sure if that made sense, but that's what I think
Hello Dr.Pete,
I experienced the new SERPS on yesterday and right away I thought that Dr. will write a post on that and you did. :-) Coming to the post, you described each aspect of SERPS closely and I must say this new layout is looking really well. I didn't know that by removing the "underline" could cause the overall impact more likable. :) Did you notice any ranking fluctuation after the redesign?
I'd also like to know have you checked the new feature in Gmail? When you composed an email, it gives you an option to attach a "Money" with it. What it's all about? Although this facility is not available in my part of the world but it seems Google wants to give some competition to Western Union with that :) isn't?
Thanks
I noticed some ranking fluctuations Tuesday, but hadn't had the new format rolled out to me yet. A site that usually ranks 8 or 9 overtook my client for 4th in 2 searches, but returned to the usual results on Wednesday. Not sure if it has anything to do with one another, but just throwing it out there.
Hey Stephen,
Thank you for your input. Well from your case, it seems this redesign didn't affect the ranking thoroughly. Let's see what Dr. says.
Great info! Tnx dr. Pete.
Have you noticed the change of G+ published posts? Just saw it this morning: https://i.imgur.com/3FYfVtZ.png
Users who aren't much aware about ads and organic result, clicking on ads very anonymously what I noticed in my adwords report of last week. Because the background color is same and a very little ad tag which is unnoticeable before click, usually!
Excelente explicación, gracias!
But what can be done if your title comes in small caps?
For eg:-- Actual title "Five Seo Tips for 2014"
SERPs:- "five seo tips for 2014"
Any new updation in Google's algo?
I've never seen them arbitrarily change the case of the title, if the keywords matched. I ran a search on that phrase (regular and exact-match), and all of the title seem to be in their original case.
Great sum up of all the changes. Great job guys. We took the liberty to borrow the screenshots for our gaze attention mapping study of the new SERP layout. Please check it out - How Google Made You Look At The Ads Again
https://blog.attensee.com/post/82188225116/how-google-made-you-look-at-the-ads-again
Glad you found the screenshots useful! Would you mind giving Moz credit as their source, where appropriate? Thanks!
"Ads" in Polish is "Reklamy". Longer, isn't it?
It does seem to be language-specific, so the non-English ones are often longer, yes. It would be interesting to see how that impacts CTR.
Its Google SERP. I think Google change its own property ....for save our self in search industry. because of this i want to chage my JOB profile.
GREAT ARTICLE! I like the last paragraph in particular... Trick question - no one cares" That pretty much sums up Google. Generally a good company and leading the world into the 21st century and beyond, but let's face it - when a Garguantua with 80+/-% market share makes a decision, there's not much anyone can do to change it.
That's a great change for 2014. When I first had a look at the search results, I was like what's going on, something is wrong with Google. Later I found out the updates in the SERPs. I wonder if the length of the Meta Tags will change, especially the Title Tag?
Dr. Peter, this is very nice discussion about changing Google SERP change in last couple of month.This discussion is quite good to identified there paid or organic result.
From a user prospective - I love the new look, feels very grown up.
From an SEO prospective - why do they have to measure the title by pixel - very inconvenient. But then again I feel users tend to scan words and not read the entire title, so as long as the first couple of words grab attention their attention the length shouldn't be too much of a problem.
There is also one change in google search results.
When we search in Google the most popular videos For Ex. Search "Gangnam Style". First Link is Official "Gangnam Style" Video From Youtube & In Some Large size. Result.
With the recent changes SEO of the sites are becoming more challenging..!
nice review about the redesign before and after :D
Thank you!
Ha! I knew something changed... thanks for the side-by-sides.
Nice article, with a lot of useful information. I am too much confusing about the Title tag Character. What is the exactly character limit for title?
See my latest post. The limit depends on a lot of factors and is pixel-based, but my data suggests that 55 characters is safe about 95% of the time.
The design is almost the same as before. As long as they are providing the right information for their customers, they will surely remain the number one search engine on the planet.
I also noticed on friday that there was 330 character meta descriptions for some results. This may not have been new, but I thought I would see if anyone else noticed and can tell me if this is a change as well?
I personally find the readability of the "After" search results not better than the "Before" versions. More whitespace in between text look nicer, but it takes more effort to scan the results.
Looks like shorter titles will look better in this format
Thanks for the share, hadn't really noticed that it's going towards a more card-like look. Keep up the good work!
As a business owner that heavily relies on Google Adwords, I'd be surprised if the new AD tag survives. It makes it too obvious they're ads and I believe click rates are going to fall. Isn't confusing people about what's an ad why Google made the background color so light that on a number of devices and at a lot of viewing angles it was hard to see what was an ad? Now they're going to make it obvious?
My guess is that in 3 months the yellow ad callout is gone because Google's revenues will drop as a result of this change.
The rest of the changes don't strike me as that big of a deal.
I'm not keen on Google's latest SERP redesign - regardless that it may look more updated on mobile + tablets. With larger fonts, the density of information in the title is reduced. The loss of link-underlining and greater use of colour + grey-scale is unfriendly when making pure-text (mono) printout for records. Getting rid of or reducing the effect of shaded-zones (in recent years) for ads, and now reducing the emphasis to pathetically faint horiz lines or boxes, with the yellow ad-logo surely become fainter in future, has obvious intentions to generate more accidental clicks.
I've now found & will use more of yandex - which has a very useful on-page option to flick to bing! So IMO, Google's kind of goofing it. I wonder if yandex searches get hosepiped to FSB, as opposed to NSA's claws on google :-(
Subtle changes in design often can have a profound impact. I am excited about these and interested in seeing what the new Ads tag will do to paid results. Has anyone noticed a decrease in paid traffic since the update?
I noticed this only yesterday when I tested a website I was working on in different browsers. Interestingly it supplied one set of SERPs with the new design in Google Chrome and the old design with a set of SERPs for the same search phrase in Firefox. It's currently this morning displaying purly the new/test design. I have a feeling it's here to stay very soon.
I'm not so keen on them but i guess I will just have to get used to it, The worst for me is the ads looking more like organic results but i guess thats Google trying to get more money from its ads.
It's not confirmed yet by Google, yes, it seems they're in final testing mode. The big change in all the new design is making the Titles bold with bigger size, adding that yellow ad icon for ads. But the biggest change is when you search any song, you get the first result as Youtube, I think the Youtube traffic will be boosted in the next days.
Dr. Peter J. Meyers There are lots of changes as you but now using Schema tag Google Snippets is an Trick to get optimize in SERP results. Adwords has taken more place then the orignal results.
Thanks for the summary. I think it's an interesting set of changes, particularly from an Adwords point of view. My first thought when I looked at the Adwords changes were that it did more to conceal the fact that they are paid Adverts, but perhaps that's because I've always associated the shaded area with Adwords. It will be interesting to monitor CTRs after the changes.
Nice information presented in the post, thanks for sharing such a great post. keep it up good work.
It looks like well organized and looks neat. But the ads doesn't look like ads anymore and the people who dont know about the difference between the ads and organic results will end up clicking on ads. This will be useful for PPC as they gonna get lot of clicks. Even facebook has changed its look, so moreover now everyone are focused on design and look. Good change.
I love these new changes of Google the user experiences will be expanding more also the CTR which is now the biggest earning factor from publisher networks. I think this UI will help webmasters to grow more organic search traffic also will confirm users providing the best UI than any other search engines on internet.
From my inexperience, I see no big changes, except the yellow Ads which cause pain in my eyes. :-)
Now visitors easily identify the paid result and organic results.
Dr. Pete Meyers,
It is the same much awaited post that I have discussed with you on twitter. It's nice to read. :-)
What's funny is that I wrote this post yesterday, so I'm not sure it's long-awaited :) I've been actually working on some projects on the product side and took a little blogging break.
Overall, most of the changes follow suit with what Google's been doing for years:
But I do find the elimination of the underlined blue link fascinating. Why some people are flipping out over this change, I do not know. But the web has really evolved, and I'd say it's safe to assume that users know what a link is and don't need that underline indication any longer. Blue and underline has meant "link" for longer than a decade now, Google probably realized, "hey, we can clear up the SERP a bit and give users some credit for understanding what a link is!"
Now, what they choose to add back into the SERP (ads, sponsored content, instant answers) is up to them. But let's all just calm down about the removal of the underline. It's really not a big deal. Does it look weird? Sure! But not a big deal.
Quick prediction from me: Eventually (years down the road), the organic links will lose their blue color, as well. Google can pass it off as something users "already know" and can continue to better showcase ad-related content and dilute the presence of organic listings that aren't instant answer or Now card-like.
That's a tough call - users are still much less savvy, overall, than most of us believe, Presumably, since Google has tested this for months across tons of people, they didn't see a drop in CTR. I'm assuming they saw a lift in ad CTR and negligible or positive impact on organic CTR.
Either that or just a lift in ad CTR… ha.
I don't care for the redesign at all. I have a 27" monitor... Making the font bigger isn't useful to me. On a functional note, SERP results looked cleaner with the link underlined.
I'd rather Google spent that time and money fixing their map issues... What they fixed, in my opinion, didn't need fixing... and there are quite a few things that DO need fixing.
It's not just you on the Internet dude! :)
I don't use Bing often but this design change reminds me of Bings approach. One thing I have noticed recently that wasn't touched on here was Googles attempt to incorporate rich snippet data in their SERPs below the title and right next to the URL. These seem to be G+ pages or Wikipedia pages, maybe a push to get people to use G+?
Dont really like the new font, but I guess its like everything. You end up getting used to these things.
I was waiting for this article when I noticed the change! How long until Google implements responsive title tags with a letter-spacing tweak? It might look better to have custom spacing for different results. Example: https://snag.gy/YAnig.jpg. Thoughts?
Dr. Pete is right. Google doesn't care about the opinions of marketers (who are trying to get the most for their money). This obviously increases revenue for them, so the only conclusion that makes any sense is that this successfully makes Google ads and properties more likely to get clicked, through whatever happens to work. I don't think it's going out on a limb to say that in this case, some visual confusion down the page helps their cause significantly.
I find it impressive that Google has become such a dominant tool that they (for several years now) do not focus on the searchers' experiences, but their own return, and still continue to dominate and gain value in the market. Google is doing "OK" despite the complaints of SEOs (and semi-SEOs): https://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=GOOG&t=5y&l=on&z=l&q=l&p=&a=&c=
Facebook will have continue to do the same of course, except with the disadvantages of being a company without the revenue runway of Google and the being a less useful as a tool. Personally I don't think Zuckerberg has any intention of making sure his investors do well. He's never cared much for doing things according to the status quo (actually he goes out of his way to disrupt it), and he has different goals than profit: https://internet.org/
Anyway, except for recognizing how these companies make changes to improve revenue and learning from the pros/cons of that the discussion about whether this is "better" for the typical reader of Moz and/or their clients is pretty pointless. Inbound Marketing presupposes the universes we operate in are operated by third parties like Google. Adapt to that environment to succeed. Also I feel it needs to be said when commenting on Moz that adaptation doesn't necessarily mean always listening to Cutts' advice; Even Google doesn't always do that.)
Harsh on eyes, preferred old.
I am just surprised that Google didn't have a good designer do these things right the first time. I mean, they can afford any designer on the planet. Why are the lettin' engineers do this work?
Google are the archetypal data-driven company. Why would they not use data/testing in their designs? Besides, getting a design right first time rarely, if ever happens.
Peter, you have clear all the doubts of so many one's. The comparision which you have mentioned here clearly shows that the current implement from Google is really very nice. And I am thinking that they will also implement in their paid advertisement. Will see what happens next. By the way nice post.
Thanks for the summary Dr. Pete!
I wonder how the length of the average SERP has changed with all the extra title size increases and horizontal spacers. Obviously more organic results are continuing to get pushed to page 2, 3... but if the actual pixel length has increased on average.
One thing I'm monitoring is the impact on the Adwords change and potential cost-increase with no net traffic increase. So potentially, users clicking an ad which they might have intentionally ignored previously, meaning the organic click I would have received is replaced by a paid for click
Fact is, for each change its worth understanding the intent. One of the goals has to be to reduce time on page, so making text easier to read so you find your result quickly and move on is one goal. Perhaps another goal is to increase paid search spend hence the 'blending' of the organic/paid results. Cynics will say they're only doing it to make more money, but then you could also say they were shooting themselves in the foot by making it too prominent.
Going back to the previous goal, if blending paid and organic results more, means less time on the page and getting the right results quicker (whilst maintaing the 'bounce back' rate) then its a win:win for Google...
It's tough, because I think the main redesign is by choice, but the ad redesign (yellow boxes) is due to pressure from regulators (most likely the EU, as Gianluca said). So, Google is trying to counterbalance the two and follow the spirit of the law without reducing ad effectiveness. They've tested both for months, so I assume they saw a lift in ad CTR (or, at least, no negative impact).
I like "before". Sorry, this style is easier to read imho.
I saw the new last month in opera - I use it less than every other browser. But now I get used to see the new design. But it still is to small... HD resolution and still it is a small pack on the left. why not center? why so small, longer titles possible with a bit more width... why not responsive???
Na - I think u will accustom to that sooner than you think now
Do I have a choice? Or... google will provide customization of title lenght, metas...?
clearly no!
And why w3c of google.com is still violated?:D
because it doesn't really matters - thats the truth 5 errors 500 errors - and who cares really? Google does not!
Write to google;)
call them - for much more fun!
Called with english speaking men from austria anywhere in a call center in europe -wanted to tell me how Google Maps Works and asked if he could help me change some things ...
The Changes are very phenomenal. It will surely increase user experience.
Thank you, very interesting
this article is very useful for me.good job