Google Search Results Snippets

When Google employees talk about snippets they are generally referring to the short block of text under the main link on a search result. This result text, traditionally is built up by displaying the Meta title and the description text for the page, which gave webmasters an easy way to use this data to promote their site and could often result in affecting the click ratios of the SERP so that the well written snippet would attract more clicks.

Snippet experiments

At least two years ago it could be seen that Google experimented with ignoring the description text if the page was relevant for a query that was not best represented in the description. Sometime after that, Rich snippets became the order of the day and although these have largely been phased out of the main search results (though they still show when you choose a vertical) it seems Google is not finished with Snippets.

Latest Snippet changes

So now Matt Cutts (Distinguished Engineer – Congratulations on the promotion) has detailed a list of recent changes that includes a change to Snippets showing that Google has once again decided to arbitrarily choose snippet text and data (snippets can now include tables and other features of html that previously were never seen) from the webpage. This is very interesting news as if it works as Google hopes then our pages will be presented with greater relevance to the search query, Google Analytics should show if this trend happens as you will see more clicks on long tail and non target search phrases. If you don’t see this pattern and see a drop off in traffic on certain pages of your site, you can check Webmaster tools for unexpected search queries and try that search yourself. What the snippet reveals could be a good indicator of what Google thinks is the pertinent information on your page, letting you change the focus of your page if it wasn’t what you wanted.