Google Updates Guidance for How Search Snippets Are Displayed

Every time you search using Google, the results are displayed in snippets consisting of a title, URL string and a brief description. Often, those descriptions are highlighted sentences that contain your searched keyword. Google has updated how snippets interact with their algorithm, changing how they work for SEO experts and ordinary users across the net.

How Search Snippets Work

It’s difficult to display a wealth of information without overwhelming the user. Fortunately, search snippets strike a perfect balance by providing the title, description and technical information like the URL in a short and easily displayed format. Then it’s up to the webmaster to provide an appealing title and a description – sometimes the HTML meta description.

The description is used to display pertinent information about pages. Online industries like e-commerce or iGaming sometimes use them for marketing, filling them with content that will catch the user’s eyes. E-commerce sites may show off sales and giveaways while iGaming providers instead show off free spins or other means like deposit matching. When searching those sites online, it’s common to find their many online casino bonuses in the snippet of relevant pages. For sites that aren’t marketing a service, news and blog content use snippet descriptions as a catchy hook to draw people into the topic of the page.

There is a big exception to this – Google will often replace those descriptions for keyword searches. Searching a site name will show the standard description but, if you search a keyword found deeper in one of its pages, you’ll see those sentences instead. It demonstrates that this is the content you’re looking for and, through featured snippets, tries to answer certain questions right there on the search results page.

Google Revises Search Snippet Documentation

Like any other part of their world-leading search engine, Google keeps extensive documentation on search snippets and how they work. This is so the SEO industry (and curious users) can gain a deeper insight into how Google functions. Google changes a lot with the years, so the relevant documentation shifts to match it.

Now Google has updated its snippet information, providing more detail about how they decide which descriptions hit the results page. In the past, Google’s documentation stated that they “use a number of different sources to automatically determine the appropriate snippet, including descriptive information in the meta description tag for each page. We may also use information found on the page, or create rich results based on markup and content on the page.”

This matches most users understanding of how those descriptions work – they pull from the description and the content on-page. However, Google revised this section to clarify that meta descriptions don’t have as much weight as some may assume from that paragraph. They replaced it with this shorter explanation – “Google primarily uses the content on the page to automatically determine the appropriate snippet. We may also use descriptive information in the meta description element when it describes the page better than other parts of the content.” Here they are clarifying that the content comes first, which is in line with their shift toward user-first, quality results per the Helpful Content updates.

That was the most substantial change, though they also deleted further paragraphs that explained the difference between rich results and meta description tags, and how they may be used to create snippets. However, since they want to stress that structured data and HTML tags now take a backseat to content, they have removed this section in its entirety. Thanks to Google’s transparency, content creators and web researchers will continue to stay updated on how the search engine works now and in the future.