Changes in Google Results Pages

Hi. My name is Tara, and I’m going to be talking about the way search results pages have changed visually over the last 12 months. Obviously, lots of changes have taken place, but these are just a few that I found interesting.

We’ve got instant previews now, where if you hover over a result, you will see a pop-up kind of screenshot of that page. This could have had a huge impact on web design, but as of yet, it doesn’t seem to have impacted too much. Maybe as people use it more, we’ll see it have an impact.

We’ve now got giant site links. So if you search for brand terms, you’ll notice that there are a lot more site links below the brand website. This is great if you are a brand because obviously you can dominate the first
page much easier. If you are not a brand, maybe you’re a retailer that stocks a brand, this can make it more difficult for you because, obviously, there is less space to get on the first page.

URLs have moved from the bottom of meta descriptions to the top of meta descriptions. This might see SEOs and web developers pay more attention to URL structure, not because of the ranking value but because of making them look more relevant and appeal more to the user to get a click.

We’ve seen Instant now. So when you type a query into Google, the page behind you updates as you type. This is supposed to make the user journey a bit more straightforward, but a lot of people have said it does kind of make it a bit more complicated because it seems quite frustrating.

We’ve seen lists in search results now, so this is kind of a micro-format thing or rich snippets. But you might see bullet points with dates and times that a certain artist is in concert.

Also, images are appearing next to articles now. So if you’ve written an article and you’ve got a Google account, your image might appear next to your article in search results. This is something that is probably going to appear more and more as more people get Google profiles.

So those are some of the things I found interesting over the last 12 months. Thanks for watching, and feel free to follow us on any of the profiles below.