The Official Google Blog today announced some improvements to Google search results that could dramatically affect your web traffic.
First, they are have deployed "a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search". They claim it will offer more useful related searches.
Second, and more importantly, they are now returning longer snippets/excerpts in the search results depending on the context of your search. To give more context, the snippet shows how the words of your query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold. Normally, the excerpts per search result is 2 lines, but now some return 3 lines. This has huge implications for SEO, because now the 1st page of search results in your full-screen browser will display 1 or 2 less search results before you have to scroll. Any time you have to scroll to see something, that's less eyeballs on the initial page, which means less web traffic. Now being in the top 7 search results on Google has become even more critical.
Here's an example and The Official Google Blog explains, "Suppose you were looking for information about Earth's rotation around the sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the sun. So you type all of that into Google: [earth's rotation axis tilt and distance from sun]. A normal-length snippet wouldn't be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics. In addition, the extra line of snippets for the third result shows the word "sun" in context, suggesting that the page doesn't talk about Earth's distance from the sun"
First, they are have deployed "a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search". They claim it will offer more useful related searches.
Second, and more importantly, they are now returning longer snippets/excerpts in the search results depending on the context of your search. To give more context, the snippet shows how the words of your query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold. Normally, the excerpts per search result is 2 lines, but now some return 3 lines. This has huge implications for SEO, because now the 1st page of search results in your full-screen browser will display 1 or 2 less search results before you have to scroll. Any time you have to scroll to see something, that's less eyeballs on the initial page, which means less web traffic. Now being in the top 7 search results on Google has become even more critical.
Here's an example and The Official Google Blog explains, "Suppose you were looking for information about Earth's rotation around the sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the sun. So you type all of that into Google: [earth's rotation axis tilt and distance from sun]. A normal-length snippet wouldn't be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics. In addition, the extra line of snippets for the third result shows the word "sun" in context, suggesting that the page doesn't talk about Earth's distance from the sun"
Technorati
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Digg
twitter
Leave a comment