Google has been busy as usual making numerous changes to its search algorithms, and on Thursday, the company posted a big list of 65 changes it made during the months of August and September. 7 of these changes were related to the snippets Google shows on search results pages.
Google has refreshed the data is uses to generate sitelinks in snippets, and a few of them are related to titles specifically. Here’s the list of snippets-related changes:
- #83105. [project “Snippets”] We refreshed data used to generate sitelinks.
- #83442. [project “Snippets”] This change improved a signal we use to determine how relevant a possible result title actually is for the page.
- #82407. [project “Other Search Features”] For pages that we do not crawl because of robots.txt, we are usually unable to generate a snippet for users to preview what’s on the page. This change added a replacement snippet that explains that there’s no description available because of robots.txt.
- #83670. [project “Snippets”] We made improvements to surface fewer generic phrases like “comments on” and “logo” in search result titles.
- #84652. [project “Snippets”] We currently generate titles for PDFs (and other non-html docs) when converting the documents to HTML. These auto-generated titles are usually good, but this change made them better by looking at other signals.
- #84211. [project “Snippets”] This launch led to better snippet titles.
- #84460. [project “Snippets”] This change helped to better identify important phrases on a given webpage.
Speaking of snippets, Google updated its Webmaster Guidelines this week, and has some new stuff about rich snippets. You can read more about that here.