When you perform a search at Google, and you have a set of search results in front of you, how do you decide what to click upon? How do you judge the page titles, the snippets, and the URLs that you see. How does Google decide what to show you? A little more than a year ago, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far wrote on the Google Webmaster Central Blog a post titled Better page titles in search results. There he told us that Google might sometimes rewrite the titles for web pages when showing them in search results. The post told us that Google might do some changing of titles when those had generic titles such as “home”, or no title at all, or:
We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one. But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages.
Before we consider how Google might decide when and how to change page titles (in a follow up post to this one), there’s another question about search results that needs some exploration.
How does Google decide upon snippets for search results when it chooses snippets from the content of pages?
Sometimes Google will use the meta description created for a page as a snippet. Sometime Google will pull a sentence or some information from the content of a page instead to display to a searcher. Chances are, if a page has a meta description that is well written, includes the keyword terms or phrases the page is optimized for, and is roughly around 150 characters or so, Google will choose the meta description to display as a snippet. But not always.
Sometimes a page ranks well enough to show in search results for words other than the terms or phrases that a page is optimized for, and those words aren’t all contained within the meta description for the page. Sometimes a page’s meta description isn’t well written and doesn’t include keywords the page is optimized for either. A meta description for a page may be extremely short and not very descriptive, which would make it a poor choice as a snippet. Sometimes a meta description might be identical to every other meta description on a site. Some pages don’t even have meta descriptions. Google could even choose to use content from a page even if the words from a query appear in a meta description.
Last March, Google was granted a patent that provides some hints about when Google might choose content to display from a page, and where it might choose that text from.
If the query terms or phrases that someone searches with are word that tend to appear on pages that have abstracts or lengthy introductions, Google might decide to pull content from the start of a page if the query terms are present.
If query terms or phrases being searched for tend to appear in ranking pages that often have conclusions at the end of a page, Google might choose to pull content to display from near the end of a page. That’s what the patent tells us: