Matt Cutts Videos on Search Snippets
Matt Cutts did a video about search snippets during his recent visit to the Google Kirkland office. In it Matt takes a detailed look at how Google constructs a search snippet. Matt uses the example of a search on “Starbucks”, which results in the following search result:
Here is a summary of the observations by Matt, with a few incremental comments sprinkled in by me:
To paraphrase: Get the keywords that are most relevant to your web page in the title of the page. Do this in a way that does not baffle the user, as this will lower your click throughs to your site. Do this for all the pages on your site.
Next, Google looks to see if they can find text within the user visible part of the page itself that matches up with the query. For example, if the search was for a specific name, and that name shows up at the bottom of the page in the text, the description snippet will likely get pulled from there, even though it is way down on the page. Google does this to help searchers more rapidly determine the relevance of the returned result to the query.
If Google is not satisfied that what they find in the user visible text of the page matcehs up with the query they are then likely to return the contents of the met description tag. This is why this tag is so important. While it does not influence rankings in any search engine I know about, it is a powerful opportunity to entice the user to click on your listing instead of someone else’s.
Matt notes that Google does know about stemming and synonyms, so if your search includes the word “car” in it, that it will understand that this is the same as “automobile” and potentially the same as “auto”. However, in this example, automobile and auto will not be highlighted in the search results, only car will.
Just to the right of the URL you will see a page size, 12K in our example. Sometimes you will also see a time stamp for when it was last crawled. This likely shows up most on those sites where freshness matters.
To the right of the Cached link appears “Similar Pages”. This is a link that will show you links to other similar sites. In Starbucks case, you get Starbucks Japan, Pizza Hut, Peet’s, Quiznos, and other food and beverage chains.
“Note This” is a link that shows up over on if you happen to be logged into Google Notebook (I was not for my screen shot). You can use that link to save a bunch of links if you are actively researching something.
Basically, Google is trying to help the user get to the page they really want much more quickly. If they really wanted to see the About Us page, for example, this presentation will save the user a click.</p
That provides a pretty complete look at a Google search result snippet. Matt has promised more videos and I will make a point of covering them all in detail as they come out.