Snippets - ABCO Technology

Google updates their snipetts

Posted on March 15, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog

Tagged: abcotechnology, ABCOTRAINING, Google, Search engine, SERPs, Snippets, Webpages

On December 1st, 2017, Barry Schwartz reported on Search Engine Land that Google had officially confirmed a change to how it displays text snippets in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Barry wrote,

“A Google spokesperson told us: ‘We recently made a change to provide more descriptive and useful snippets, to help people better understand how pages are relevant to their searches. This resulted in snippets becoming slightly longer, on average.’”

These snippets are the blurbs of text displayed in Google’s SERPs along with the clickable blue text and the page URL.

A quick Google search corroborates this – let’s use the query “how were the pyramids built” as an example:

In the answer to the general query, you can see that where Google would previously display a snippet approximately 150-165 characters long including spaces (give or take, you can see it varies now and it varied before Google made the change too), but now they’re much longer.

The text snippet Google shows in the SERP is *supposed* to be (more on this later) the contents of the meta description tag in the HTML of the page – let’s check each of these page’s actual meta descriptions and their lengths.

Here they are, in the same order as above:

◾There are no photographs of the pyramid being built, and the engineers didn’t leave detailed blueprints. [Length:109]

◾The ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids may have been able to move massive stones by transporting them over wet sand. [Length:122]

◾No meta description specified in the HTML

◾Here’s everything you need to know about the incredible Egyptian pyramids. [Length:74]

Two things jump out right away.

1.Google is not displaying the page’s actual meta description as the SERP snippet for these specific listings for this specific query, even when the meta description is specified in the HTML, but instead is being pulled directly from the text that appears at or near the top of the page.

2.The length of the snippets is longer than the length that Google previously displayed, congruent with Google’s confirmation that they’re showing longer SERP snippets.

Here’s how that breaks down for the above query, again in the same order as the SERP listing screenshot above:

◾The first sentence of the text is used as the SERP snippet

◾The H1 page headline, followed by ellipses ( … ), followed by the second, third, and fourth sentences on the page in the first paragraph (skipping the first sentence in the first paragraph) are used as the SERP snippet.

◾The first and second sentences, and part of the third, are used as the SERP snippet

◾The first and second sentences, the image ALT attribute (or the image caption, they’re both the same text), plus text via HTML code associated with the image, Checking a number of other queries returned similar observations about what Google is using as the SERP snippet, but note that some SERP snippets were indeed taken from the actual meta description.

For example, in the SERP for a query for musician “Todd Rundgren”, this SERP snippet is obviously taken directly from the meta description:

For many other queries I performed, both commercial and non-commercial in query intent, it turned up a mix of SERP snippet sources – primarily either text on the page or the actual meta description specified in the HTML, and in some cases via image ALT attribute, and occasionally from some other bit of code in the HTML.

On mobile devices, the SERP snippets were very similar, in many cases the same as on desktop.

The SERP orders were slightly different, so yes, there’s going to be ranking variations based on various factors (it’s well known that Google can and will alter the SERPs you see based on your search history, geo-location, query type, your previous interaction with SERPs, etc.).

However, the overall scheme of the SERP snippets remained constant – text was taken mostly from either the first paragraph of the page, or the meta description, and in some cases the image ALT attribute, and occasionally from other text in the HTML code.

Dr. Pete Meyers over at Moz conducted research late last year on 89,909 page-one organic results.

Pete noted that the average SERP snippet was 215 characters long with the median length at 186, and he was quick to point out that, “big numbers are potentially skewing the average. On the other hand, some snippets are very short because their Meta Descriptions are very short”.

Pete also noted no significant differences between desktop and mobile snippet lengths, sometimes seeing mobile snippets longer than desktop snippets.

For sure the actual SERP snippet you see, and the length, will vary by query type.

What is going on here?

Google is trying to satisfy searchers.

Yes, traditionally the idea was that Google would pull the SERP snippet from the meta description, but for years now Google has been using whatever text its algorithms determine makes the most sense based on the user’s query.

Not all sites – for example, Wikipedia and another we saw above – don’t even make use of the meta description tag in the HTML of their pages, so what’s a poor search engine to do in that case?

Similarly, what if the meta description is badly written, or spammy-sounding with lots of keyword stuffing, or doesn’t well-reflect the page’s theme and topic(s)?

So that’s what’s going on here – Google evolved over time to use whatever it deems makes the most sense to a user performing a certain query.

Wait: What the heck is a meta description, anyway?

Meta descriptions are HTML code that Google understands, and that is meant to provide a synopsis of the page.

Here’s an example:

This code goes between the tags of the HTML and is not displayed on the visible content that a user would see.

Do meta descriptions impact SEO?

Meta descriptions will not impact rankings.

But, if Google does use a page’s meta description as the SERP snippet, that can impact click-through from the SERP.

That’s because a well-written meta description that is compelling, relevant to the page, and relevant to the query or queries for which the page is ranking, can impact organic traffic.

And that can have a downstream impact on conversions (the desired actions you want website visitors to take – fill out a form, buy something, and so on).

Poorly written meta descriptions, if used as the SERP snippet, can have the opposite effect and discourage the user to click through to your page, and instead go to your competitors.

So, what should be your strategy now that Google has increased the SERP snippet length?

In summary, you could do any of the following:

◾Do nothing at all

◾Rewrite longer meta descriptions for all your pages

◾Rewrite longer meta descriptions for some of your pages (e.g. your top ten or twenty organic landing pages, or some pages you determine have low click-thru rates)

◾Delete all your meta descriptions

◾Audit your site’s content to ensure that the first text on your page is compelling, uses keywords congruent with how someone would search for your content, ensure the first paragraph contains at least 300-350 characters of text including spaces, and front-load the first 150 characters in case google changes back to shorter snippets in the future.

What you decide to do (or not do) will at least in part hinge upon resources you have available to make changes.

Don’t take a “set it and forget it” attitude with your website’s content and your meta descriptions. It’s common for businesses to put in a fair amount of work into their website, then just let it go stale.

A good recommendation here would be to cycle through this stuff on a regular basis – think quarterly or a couple times per year. Once per year at a minimum.

Here’s what I recommend

First, it should be obvious that your page’s textual content is for humans to consume, and that should always be your primary consideration.

You’ve heard the phrase “dance like no one’s watching” – well, write like Google doesn’t exist. But Google does exist, and their mission is satisfied users (so that people continue to use their service and click on ads) – Google is chasing satisfied users and so should you.

The refrain of “write great content” has been used ad nauseum. The only reason I’m mentioning the whole “write for your users” thing is simply because often people focus primarily on “how do I SEO my pages?” instead of “what’s good for my users?”.

Okay, with that out of the way and forefront in your mind, here’s what I recommend. Adjust this according to your specific needs – your industry, your users – don’t just take this as a cookie-cutter approach.

And, do this on the time frame that makes the most sense and works for you and the resources you have available to you to make changes to your site. If you haven’t looked at your page content and meta descriptions in a year or more, then this is a higher priority for you than if you refreshed all that 60 days ago.

Meta descriptions

◾Make them about 300-320 characters long, including spaces

◾Make the meta description super-relevant to the page text

◾Front-load the first 150-165 characters with your most-compelling text – compelling to your users who might see the text as a SERP snippet (just in case Google decides to shorten them again)

◾Use a call to action if applicable, but don’t be a used car salesman about it – and as appropriate, use action-oriented language

◾Remember WIIFM – what’s in it for me – as applicable, focus on benefits, not features

◾Don’t be deceptive or make promises your page content can’t keep

Keep in mind that Google may not use your meta description as the SERP snippet and may instead use content from your page, likely from the first paragraph.

With that in mind:

Review & refresh your content

◾Make sure the H1 page headline is super-relevant to the page’s topic

◾Include an image (as applicable) that is super-relevant to the page (not one of those dumb, tangentially-related stock images) and craft an excellent and page-relevant image ALT attribute

◾Ensure that your opening paragraph is enticing and practically forces the reader to keep reading – that way if it’s the text used as the SERP snippet, that will capture people’s attention.

Summary

My summary is that if you haven’t already, please go back and read the whole article – I promise you it’ll be worth it. But I will add one more piece here and that is that ostensibly the type of content you’re creating is going to dictate how you configure your meta descriptions, H1 page headlines, and especially the opening text on the page.

In some cases, it makes sense to use the “how to feed a (Google) hummingbird” technique where you pose the topic’s question and answer it concisely at the top of the page, then defend that position, journalism style, in the rest of the text under that.

Similarly, you may be shooting for a SERP featured snippet and voice-assistant-device answer using bullet points or a numbered list at the top of your content page.

The point is, the guidelines and recommendations I’ve provided for you here are not a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to your meta descriptions and your content. SEO experience, switching your brain into the on position, and a willingness to test, observe, and adjust are all mandatory to achieve the best results.

ABCO Technology teaches a comprehensive class for web development. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who can qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at :

11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

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Google’s featured snippets what do they mean?

Posted on February 17, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, News

Tagged: abcotechnology, ABCOTRAINING, Google, Snippets

The use of snippets is important for many websites.

Google uses featured snippets to make it easier to connect us to the information we want, but in doing so could they be endangering the basic model the entire web relies on? We get free information and in return, we used to get served a couple of adverts on the site we look at. But without being able to serve those ads, there’s less incentive to create that content.

Featured snippets explained

Featured snippets are intended to make it easier for you to access the information available on a web page by bringing it directly into the search results.

Sometimes when you do a search, you’ll find that there’s a descriptive box at the top of Google’s results. We call this a “featured snippet.”

https://blog.google/products/search/reintroduction-googles-featured-snippets/

Here’s an example from the Google blog post where they ‘reintroduce’ them:

So in short it’s taking the text from a page and then featuring it prominently in the search results.

#Google’s shift from connection engine to information engine

#Google has always been a connection engine. However, there appears to be a continuing change in the way in which Google sees itself. The model has always been:

•I enter a search term and Google provides a list of links to content that best answers that search

•I click on a paid or free result

•Google gains money from paid results and advertising on publishers’ sites

•Publishers get paid by the advertising on their sites

Google is increasingly moving towards just showing me the information, lifted directly from the content it indexes. The shift is subtle but it is destroying that model. So now the relationship looks like this;

•I enter a search term and Google provides me the information that best serves the search

•I read the information on Google

Not only is this chain a lot shorter, it also removes the publishers and so Google’s own methods of monetization. The key though is that Google only shows snippets for certain types of results. Results for searches with a clear purchase intent would be naturally less likely to show a snippet but more likely to have PPC ads. Whilst some results do also feature PPC results, in every search I did these were shown above the snippet, with the organic content below.

The potential effects of snippets on websites

When your business relies on traffic from providing specific or niche information then snippets can be devastating. Take the case of Celebrity networth.com as detailed in The Outline. If you want to know what someone famous is worth, you look it up on their site and they give you a number and breakdown of how they reached it. The most important thing is the number, that’s the key information people are looking for.

Back in 2014 Google emailed the owner of the site, Brian Warner, and asked for permission to use the data from the site in the knowledge graph, Brian was not keen…

“I didn’t understand the benefit to us,” he said. “It’s a big ask. Like, ‘hey, let us tap into the most valuable thing that you have, that has taken years to create and we’ve spent literally millions of dollars, and just give it to us for free so we can display it.’ At the end of it, we just said ‘look, we’re not comfortable with this.’”

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com

However when snippets were introduced Google just went ahead and took the information anyway. The information that Brian had said he didn’t want being used by them.

The result was a loss of 65% of traffic year on year and having to lay off staff as the profitability of the site took a nose dive. That’s the very real impact of Google’s change from connecting you to the information to delivering that information right there on the page. The sites that provide that information, the ones that have actually put the time and effort into creating the content, are the ones that lose out.

#Snippets likely won’t affect all websites as badly as in this example, it is just one example. But other studies consistently show featured snippets reduce clicks on other results, in effect cannibalizing traffic. Take this study from ahrefs:

Why did snippets need reintroducing?

Snippets just weren’t that bright, and there were several high profile examples of them failing. Some snippets appeared to have been removed, especially on more controversial topics.

The problem came about through a combination of not understanding the user intent and not being picky about where information was pulled from. Google’s failure to properly understand intent is something they have got in trouble with before, like with the ‘Unprofessional Hair’ problem.

As Google shifts from connecting to content, to connecting to information directly, intent becomes even more important. Of course without the context of the rest of the content we’re even less able to judge the validity of the information shown. Especially when these snippets also serve to provide information for Google Home Assistant. So there is little context available, beyond the name of the site, to evaluate the information against. It’s simply a case of being told an answer to a question as if it’s ‘The Answer’ rather than ‘an answer’.

This also leads to problems such as the case highlighted by Danny Sullivan in his own announcement post for the new feature:

Source: Google blog

Here we have two queries where the intent is the same. The suitability of reptiles as pets. However in a glass half full / half empty kind of way different people phrase this question differently depending on their initial bias. Google has then served each with a snippet that reinforces that bias. In effect two different answers to the same question depending on the searcher’s expectation of the result. For my results at least, Google appears to have put in a speedy fix for this by stopping the snippet showing on one set of results. Replacing reptiles with goats replicated the effect though, so it doesn’t look to be a fix for the wider issue.

This might not appear to be a big problem when it comes to reptiles or goats but things could potentially get out of hand quickly as they roll this out across more queries and cover more topics (for example politics). Searching around at the moment it looks like political or controversial topics are more restricted, especially in terms of the search content.

It’s not just snippets either

It’s not just content publishers that need to watch out. Google appears to be developing their own tools for popular queries and placing these directly in the search results. This is the result I get for a search on ‘internet speed test’:

I guess for the rest of the sites offering a speed checker it’s just tough. This is different from snippets as it’s not using anyone else’s information. But in this example at least Google appears to be creating a tool and then placing it at the top of the search results above competing tools. I personally feel that sets a bit of a dangerous precedent as this could potentially spread with Google creating more tools, in partnership with more companies, so harming the competition. Competition and diversity are good, but people will be less likely to innovate and create new tools if Google is going to just step in when something gets popular and publish their own tool above everyone else’s in the results.

Google has got into trouble before for placing their own services above competitors. In July of 2017 it received a record-breaking $2.7 billion fine from the EU for antitrust violations with their shopping comparison service:

Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google’s comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results.

Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google’s search results on the basis of Google’s generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google’s search results, and others appear even further down. Google’s own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google’s generic search algorithms, including such demotions.

So Google put their own service higher up in the results than competing services and didn’t make their own service subject to the same ranking algorithms as their competitors.

Source: TechCrunch

What will this mean for content?

The trouble with snippets is that the places this might hit hardest are those which invest more in the creation of their content. Or in other words, the content which has higher editorial standards. If you’re a journalist, someone needs to be paying you to write the content, an editor needs to be paid to sub the content, designers and photographers paid for graphics and images.

So the content which stands to lose the most is arguably the most important, whilst the lower quality, recycled, poorly researched and quickly written content, which needs to generate less revenue as it costs so much less to churn out, remains profitable.

This creates a vicious cycle: as there is more low-quality content it therefore captures a greater share of the audience, higher quality content gets more drowned out and so gets less revenue and diminishes even further.

Mobile users want information delivered more quickly and concisely. We have shorter user journeys on mobile with less time on site and a higher bounce rate. Capturing these visitors with properly optimized content is important as mobile is a key part of Google’s revenue as it continues to dominate the mobile search market.

It does also mean, however, that the user is less likely to visit a site which is funded by ads ironically likely served through Google’s own platform. However Google might be less concerned about this depending on how much importance they are placing on their Home Assistant product. The snippets are used by the AI to provide answers for your questions. Ads don’t factor into this and they could perhaps have calculated they stand to gain more from better information here than the loss from fewer ads served on those sites.

#ABCO #Technology teaches a comprehensive course for search engine optimization. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who can qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:

11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

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