In a move hardly surprising to SEOs Google has officially announced two new “improvements” in its search results; “longer search result descriptions” (snippets) and “an expanded list of useful related searches”.
Longer Description Snippet
If you conduct a search for wolverine movie review you’ll notice that the description snippet under the blue title tag contains two lines and cuts off at around 150 characters.
If you amend the search to include Hugh Jackman, you’ll notice that the description snippet has increased to 3 lines to provide users with more info from the page within the snippet.
Expanded related searches
The example Google gives for this is a search for the keyword principles of physics. The related links at the bottom of the results include angular momentum and big bang, all semantically related to the keyword physics.
These improvements by Google are meant to provide users with a better search experience in finding what their looking for but how will that affect click through rates?
The general consensus is that it would decrease them as users will eventually be able to find what they’re looking for without actually going to the site!
