Google Announces New Search Changes
Google just made life more difficult for websites hoping to rank high on Google. They announced several changes to the way they present searches to the user.
As an example, Google uses a person looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but she is most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. With the new Search Options she can search for the product’s name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week.
The Search Options “panel” also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. Google says, “One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways.”
Google has also begun implementing a process to help people by providing better information than you are used to seeing in the preview text. They call this information “rich snippets.” They give an example “… if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant’s price range:
In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.”
Google says it provide these snippets on its own, so they are hoping that web publishers will help them by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. They have in the past talked about “time on site” being a part of their search algorithm.
Google plans to roll out more changes soon so there is much to stay on top of if you want to “stay on top of” the first page of Google.