The Anatomy Of A Snippet
Posted on 26. Jan, 2009 by in on page seo
The snippet is the description of your web page that appears in the search results. But where does it come from?? Let’s break down the text that we see when we search for something.
In general, Google tries to display the most useful information for searchers, and this task includes the retrieval of the most relevant snippet for the search being performed.
Consider where the snippet might come from. Matt Cutts offers the hypothetical situation in which your site was down when the Googlebot came a visiting. How can Google derive a meaningful snippet in this case? The ODP is one source that Google uses. If Google can’t crawl the page, the snippet may come from there.
Sometimes the most useful snippet – in the context of the search being performed – is retrieved from a particular portion of the page (see around 2:15 in the video). This may be anywhere on the page, not necessarily near the top. The snippet can even be formed from text in multiple parts of the page! Snazzy.
You do have some control over what text is displayed though and that control is exerted via the meta description for the page. Matt advises you to play around with the meta description to determine what text converts best.
You may notice that some snippets display a little “plus box”. Clicking on this icon displays extra information about the URL shown. This information can take the form of stock charts, addresses and is displayed underneath the snippet.
Miscellaneous Points About Snippets
Google bolds the words you searched for and this bolding may be apparent in the title, snippet and url of the page shown.
Of interest to all you LSI stalwarts, Google sometimes returns pages about “automobiles” when the word “cars” is searched for.
Some results show what are known as sitelinks: a collection of links on a site that the searcher may be interested in. Again, the presence of links is search dependant. A page won’t always be displayed together with sitelinks; it depends on what the user searched for.
