Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is ‘Untitled’ or if there is no title. If that’s the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."

"We reserve the right to try to figure out what’s a better title, what’s a more descriptive title or snippet to show the users," he continues.

According to Cutts, if you have a title that’s really long, they may still use that in their scoring, but in the snippet, they might try to find a "better title." This is presumably based on what the user is looking for.

As Cutts has said in the past, sometimes Google will use snippets right from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Sometimes, they’ll simply use snippets from the page or the meta description tag. "We do a bunch of different things to find the best description that we can," he says.

"If you have a bad title or a title that we don’t think helps users as much, we can try to find a better title, and one we think will be an informative result so that users will know whether that’s a good result for them to click on," he says.

Have you noticed Google changing your titles? Did they find better ones? Discuss here.

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Google gives the example of the result for the Wikipedia entry for "Trans Fat." The snippet provides links to History, Chemistry, Presence in food, and Nutritional guidelines. These are all sections of one page that the user can go straight to from the results page.

Obviously, if you want to increase the amount of calls to action for your webpages from Google results, you will want to do what you can to cater to this new feature. Luckily, this isn’t a completely mysterious part of the algorithm (though the links are generated algorithmically) that Google is leaving you to figure out for yourself. A post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog essentially tells you what you have to do to get these links in snippets.

"We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links)," says Raj Krishnan of Google’s Snippets team. "There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages."

To increase said chances, you should make sure any multi-topic pages are "well-structured" and broken into distinct sections. You should also make sure each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name. Pages like this should have a table of contents which link to the individual anchors.

One thing to keep in mind is that these new links won’t appear for results in every search. Google says whether they show up or not depends on the specific query used to get to it. Ok, there is a bit of mystery there after all.

Original Article: Today at Google’s Searchology event, the company announced (among other things) that it was rolling out richer snippets. The snippets will extract and show more useful info from results than the current ones, Google says.

"For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant’s price range," says a joint post to the Google Blog from Marissa Mayer and Jack Menzel.

They explain that Google can do not this on their own. It us up to webmasters to contribute to this. "We hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats and RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface," they say. "This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google."

That is one theory. Another would be that users would get all the info they need right from the SERP and have no reason to click through to the actual site. This would certainly depend on the individual result, and the information that accompanied it as well as the user’s intent. It’s just something for publishers to consider. How much information do you want to give away before the click?

The richer snippets will be rolled out gradually. Those who are interested in getting participating in this can read up at the rich snippets help page Google has set up.

The company says it’s deploying a new technology that better understands associations and concepts related to searches. Google explains:

…one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that "angular momentum," "special relativity," "big bang" and "quantum mechanic" are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Google says it’s able to target more queries, more languages, and make suggestions more relevant to what users are looking for. We’ve heard Google talk about wanting to get better with intent-based search, and it looks like they’re now doing something about it.

"Additionally, we’re now offering refinements for longer queries — something that’s usually a challenging task," says a post on the Official Google Blog. The feature is available in 37 languages all around the world."

As for the longer snippets, users will see them when they search for longer queries (which users are using more of these days). They will display more text to show more of the keywords used in the query and how they are used on the page.

These changes may not be the final word in intent-based search. The "java" example discussed by Bruce Clay late last year isn’t addressed very well here. The related searches suggested when I search for that keyword do not include coffee or country related items. Still, the features are an indication that Google is indeed looking in this direction.

Sidenote: Mike McDonald sat down with Bruce Clay again at Search Engine Strategies last week and dicussed the subject of intent-based search among other things:

The longer snippets feature is not exactly delivering more relevant results than before, but it could go a long way toward helping users determine if results in fact  are relevant by giving them more info to reach a conclusion.

Tell us what you think about Google’s SERP changes.

Google snippets are those short pieces of text that appear under each item in a Google Search Engine Report Page (SERP). They too have a strict limit of 155 characters and spaces, just a little more than a Twitter tweat. Google snippets are produced by computers. Perhaps it’s time for Google to re-examine its snippets reasoning, because it is questionable how successful it is.

If you believed the Google documentation, you might believe that Web page Descriptions would be a key summary of the content of Web pages in their keyword search results:

We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

They even go so far as to encourage you to Improve snippets with a meta description makeover:

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

In practice it doesn’t turn out exactly like that. You need to choose very carefully the exact words of your Descriptions if they are to be used at all, as you can see in (You Must) SEO Those Descriptions For More Google Visitors.

A post by William Slawski suggests why this is happening. It relates to Google’s fixation on inlinks to a Web page. So they may well Use Anchor Text to Determine the Relevance of a Web Page. In such a case, perhaps they wish to justify their reasoning by including it in the Snippet they construct to show the item is Relevant. Bill’s advice if this is affecting your Google appearances runs as follows:

If you run a web site, you may have visitors coming to your pages based upon the content anchor text in links pointing to your pages instead of the text upon your pages themselves. If the term is one that you want to be found for, you may want to consider adding some text to the page, if possible, using that query term, to provide a more persuasive snippet for the search results.

Perhaps if you put that persuasive language in the Description, it has a better chance of surviving that snippet creation process.

Standing well back, you might even question how customer-centric Google snippets are. Are they really the best way for searchers to find what they’re looking for? Perhaps they are motivated by a wish to prove that some apparently obscure item should logically appear in the SERP. Why else would you add in text taken from other related Web pages? The resulting snippets often seem much more attractive to computers than to the human readers they are intended for.

So do Google snippets work for you? Would you like to see Google change how it helps you to find what you’re looking for? Perhaps your comments here could trigger some rethinking.

Comments

During the ongoing court battle between Google and its book scanning author and publisher foes, the idea of the snippet has been bounced around as people tried to define it. So far the meaning of a snippet has been whatever Google or any other search site says it is.

Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea writes that Google has received a patent on snippets. First filed in 2004, the patent called “methods and systems for generating textual information,” the patent refers to snippets as a summary based on other summaries of a document, taken from that document.

In part, anyway.

“It doesn

How To Look Your Best In Search Results

Because nobody makes snap judgments like a searcher.

During a recent trip to Google’s Kirkland, Washington office, Matt Cutts and colleagues spent an hour creating impromptu videos on various search-related topics. The first to be posted involves "the anatomy of a search snippet," and how much control a webmaster has over what information is displayed in search results.

The answer to how much control is: quite a bit, actually. This article will explore Cutts’s explanation of the snippet, and ways to make the best of your search presence. Much of managing your appearance in the search results involves telling Google what to index and what not to index.

Homepage Title

The first thing you see in your search result is the title, and this is the first thing that Cutts also addresses. In honor of being in the Pacific Northwest, he used Starbucks’ search result as an example, which labels its homepage as "Starbucks Homepage." This is your first impression.

Cutts questioned whether the word "homepage" was a good choice (Google took the title directly from the page) as few would search for that word. Starbucks being so recognizable, it hardly matters, but for smaller business it’s a good idea to optimize wherever you can. "Starbucks Coffee" might have been a better SEO choice.

A usability expert might argue, though, that straightforward is best, and giving the searcher what he or she expects to see will have a direct impact on whether a link is clicked. 

The Snippet

The snippet is where the webmaster has the most control of what is displayed about his or her site. Google often pulls the snippet text directly from the meta description tags, and Cutts recommends experimenting with the text to see what yields the best results for individual sites.

Longer snippets, as we’ve noted before, help searchers with informational queries, and may also be of benefit for SEO reasons. Shorter ones work better for navigational queries.

Google may also pull snippets from other places as well, depending on the query or situation. If no description is available, Cutts says Google may grab information from the Open Directory Project or other directories. Or, to find the context of a query, Google may look to beyond meta description tags to increase relevance.

If there is content you don’t want to appear in the snippet, you can add the "nosnippet tag" to your HTML, which looks like this: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

Cache Page

The cache page acts as a backup if a website is for some reason unavailable. It will show an archived version of your site, show when it was last crawled by the Googlebot, and serves as a sort of content freshness indicator. Regularly updating content is a good way to influence what appears there, but also useful is the ability to tell Google what not to archive. To prevent the Googlebot from creating a cached version of a page, use the NOARCHIVE tag, which looks like this <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

Site Links

Cutts was quick to assure viewers that site links were algorithmic and not payment based. In the Starbucks example, these would be headed "Store Locator" and "Career Center." So there may not be a lot of control over Google chooses as an important related page to increase searcher relevancy, other than using a NOINDEX tag for certain pages so the Googlebot knows what to skip, and making sure the language is clear as to what the pages you do want indexed are for.

If a page is seasonal or promotional only and you want Google to stop crawling that page after a certain time period, you can use the "unavailable_after" tag. Effective use of the tags mentioned also help control what appears on the "more results" page.

His video, which was made in Google’s Kirkland offices, delves into the anatomy of a snippet.  Here’s the good news: according to the head of Google’s webspam team, “The majority of the time you have a great deal of control about how things get presented.”  And there really is no bad news.  Cutts just encouraged experimentation as a way of maximizing clicks and conversions.

Cutts noted that, in many cases, Google uses a site’s meta description tag to form its snippet; therefore, changing the tag may be the fastest way to alter a snippet.  At the same time, Cutts stated, “We do try to find the most relevant parts of a page,” so it might be a good idea to poke around Google Experimental to get an idea of where the search experience is headed.

This will likely include a lot of sitelinks; Cutts spent several moments focusing on those.  Sites that aren’t currently blessed with them needn’t worry, however, as Cutts explained that they are “completely algorithmic.”  Also, to address a more specific concern, he made clear that nobody pays money to get them.

Assuming you’ve got eight minutes to spare, the entire of the video is worth a watch; aside from this useful information on snippets, it contains an SEO tip or two.

In my SEO blog reading yesterday, I first found a post by Danny Sullivan about meta tags. Then just this morning I read a post by Matt McGee also about meta tags and he makes the same point:

The Keywords meta tag is useless, except for misspellings.

If your page has a product, service, or keyword that can be misspelled, instead of intentionally misspelling the word in your text, use your keywords meta tag. It won’t get you page 1 placement necessarily, but it definitely makes a difference.

If I had say in the Googlerithm, I would tie the spelling functions with the search functions, and if a page ranked well for a certain phrase, but the user misspelled the phrase, I would certainly give more relevance to a page that had the misspelling on it (albeit in a keyword meta tag).

With that said, I would certainly not focus much time at all working on the keywords meta tag, but while you’re under the hood making changes to your site, it wouldn’t hurt.

Comments

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For coverage of this incident, we can turn to Search Engine Journal’s Gemme van Hasselt, who lives in Shanghai.  “China Herald tipped me that the Yahoo.com website (the English version) didn’t resolve,” he reported.  “I checked, saw that it was true and thought I would check back the next day . . . .  I checked again and Yahoo.com is still unavailable.  Also search.yahoo.com stopped giving results entirely.”

Strangely enough, Yahoo China was unaffected by the block; Gemme hypothesizes that its Chinese owners (Alibaba calls the shots) might have provided some form of protection.

In any event, things are now back to normal.  Gemme remains in the dark as to the cause of this outage (as do the rest of us), and the Shanghai China Snippets site comments, “It’s up again.  The question is, is it accessible again because of a glitch in the Chinese firewall or is it allowed in again for good.”

That’s a good point – and one that has probably made more than a few Yahoo execs carry around bottles of antacid.  Of course, for the rest of us, Snippets adds, “The Chinese internet, never a dull moment…”