Should Google Tweat Its Snippets? Options

[bwelford]

Many now use Twitter to give status reports on what is happening in their corner of the universe. The strict imposition of no more than 140 characters and spaces seems to concentrate the mind most effectively. Tweats are produced by human writers and can certainly be rated a success.

Google snippets are those short pieces of text that appear under each item in a Google Search Engine Report Page (SERP). They too have a strict limit of 155 characters and spaces, just a little more than a Twitter tweat. Google snippets are produced by computers. Perhaps they are less successful than Tweats?

You might even question how customer-centric Google snippets are. Are they really the best way for searchers to find what they’re looking for? Perhaps they are motivated by Google's wish to prove that some apparently obscure item should logically appear in the SERP. The resulting snippets often seem much more attractive to computers than to the human readers they are intended for.

Do Google snippets work for you? Would you like to see Google change how it helps you to find what you’re looking for?

[EGOL]

I like Google snippets when I am searching for something obscure or for information about a person, or an address. The snippet often shows the context of how that term is used on the page and saves me from clicking into the page and hunting it down. As a searcher I like this feature.

As a webmaster, I try to write good description tags because Google often uses them as the snippet. I can use the description tag for secondary marketing or as a call for action that is displayed in the SERPs.

Looking forward... maybe some day search engines will be able to pass query information to websites. If a person searches for "Bluenote Widgets" perhaps the search engine could pass those words to my website and there would be an easy to install tool that make them appear in highlight on my page... or maybe the link to my page would dropdown to the occurrence of those words on my page. These links could be tiny icons beneath the snippet. Searchers would click them if they want the highlighting or the dropdown anchor.

[Ron Carnell]

Google snippets are produced by computers.

Uh, I don't think so, Barry. They're all written by human beings . . . most of whom just don't take search engines into consideration.

If Google isn't using a portion of your meta-description for its snippet on a search, then you just haven't finished optimizing the page yet. In my opinion, that wouldn't be Google's fault.

[bwelford]

Don't like to disagree, Ron, but Google itself says it produces snippets using a computer. The precise snippet that is displayed in any given SERP depends on the keywords searched for on that particular page.

The Newsletter cited in my signature (SEO Those Descriptions) shows examples of the dramatic differences you can get in the snippets by small changes in the keywords. I hesitate to say their snippet process is broken, but I don't think it works very well.

[EGOL]

For some queries/sites the description tag is used verbatim... but for others an algo grabs the snippet.

[yannis]

I hesitate to say their snippet process is broken, but I don't think it works very well.

Well it is not exactly broken, but anything that needs NLP is prone to surprises and errors. This is more prominent also for non-html pages such as pdfs (see image below).




The links actually return perfectly readable pdfs! I am sure it is some form of encoding or decoding problem.


Yannis

PS For your descriptions, punctuation is very important. One fairly common strategy for text summarizers is to actually extract sentences. They then try to reduce the number of sentences to relevant ones (i.e the ones that contain important keywords). My guess Google uses a similar process. Fairly standard text-analysis procedures.

This post has been edited by yannis: Mar 26 2008, 02:33 PM

[Respree]

I think you guys might be talking about two different things.

Of course, the description meta tag and content is written by a human being. The algo which determines if the the snippet will be based on the meta tag or content is done by a computer. The number of characters surrounding the search query that goes into the calculation of what the content snippet looks like is done by a computer.

I think you're both right, but are saying two different things.

Any opinions how they determine whether meta tag or content will be used as the basis for the snippet?

This post has been edited by Respree: Mar 26 2008, 02:29 PM

[yannis]

Any opinions how they determine whether meta tag or content will be used as the basis for the snippet?

Sorry Garrick it appears we were posting at the same time. My opinion is that the algo looks for the keywords or n-gram and returns the relevant one (ie meta or snippet), See the PS in my post above.

Yannis

[bwelford]

In one of the Google references, they write the following:

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

[yannis]

Barry I just posted a slightly different post which might also be relevant to this discussion. The BBC snippet was picked up from way down the text and not the meta. Meta can mean meta-information. I also remember reading one of their early patents, where they state that the snippet can be picked up from relevant sections of the page.


Yannis

[Ron Carnell]

Don't like to disagree, Ron, but Google itself says it produces snippets using a computer.

It's probably a niggling quibble, Barry, but I would still contend that Google doesn't "produce" snippets so much as it selects them. And except for a few well known exceptions, it never selects anything that isn't already there.

Let's carry that a step further. I also contend that you have almost complete control over what Google will select for your snippet for any search you intend to capture (or any search you later discover you've inadvertently captured). One well written sentence of the proper length in the meta-description, including all the search terms, is all it will take in about 99.5 percent of cases.

Any opinions how they determine whether meta tag or content will be used as the basis for the snippet?

Some, Garrick. Some.

[bwelford]

And except for a few well known exceptions, it never selects anything that isn't already there.

.. isn't already where? As Bill Slawski points out in a recent post, this may well include Anchor Text on other web pages. He is looking at a Microsoft patent on this, but I'm sure Google does something similar. After all, they believe that such text is a strong determinant of Relevance.

[Ron Carnell]

Microsoft may have recently filed a patent, Barry, but most I think would agree that Google and Yahoo have been using anchor text to determine relevancy for several years. There's nothing new there. So far, in my experience, Google doesn't use the anchor text, however, as a snippet.

Classic case: Search for click here. The first result, of course, is the download page for Adobe Reader. The snippet does NOT come from or include the anchor text (it's from one of the dynamic menus), though a quick glance at the cached page will nonetheless include the note "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: click here." Again, nothing new here I think. This has been Google's behavior for almost as far back as I can remember.

Still, let's speculate for a minute. What if search engines did indeed start using anchor text to assemble snippets? Isn't it logical to assume they would most likely do that only when the anchor text wasn't better represented as on-page content? Like Adobe's "click here" scenario? Seems to me that would again present a fairly easy and controllable solution: Put the same search terms as found in the anchor text into a well formed sentence of the meta-description. I think it's fairly safe to say the SE would use that in preference to a shorter and often less meaningful phrase from anchor text.

Barry, I'm sure situations exist where we do lose control of the snippet. So far, however, I've never seen one. In every single instance in my experience, putting the search terms in a meta-description sentence resulted in THAT sentence being used in the snippet as soon as the page was crawled. Every instance. (Knock on wood. )

[bwelford]

Ron, this is still currently the 'official' Google definition of a Snippet:

Snippet
A short description of or excerpt from a website which appears in Google search results. Snippets are created automatically based on the site’s content or the content of pages that link to the site.

Is this typical Google obfuscation or could there be some truth to it?

I guess it depends what you mean by 'losing control of the snippet'. My definition of losing control is that there is an ellipsis (...) somewhere in the snippet and that phrases rather than complete sentences are used. Given that searchers may put all sorts of long tail keyword searches together, I think that kind of loss of control is probably quite frequent.

Indeed I would throw down the gauntlet on a minor snippet challenge. Can anyone suggest three fairly distinct keyword searches where the same Web page comes up in say the Top One Hundred and all three snippets for the Web page do not contain an ellipsis? I've tried and have not yet succeeded.

[iamlost]

Speaking of Google (the SEs do differ ) they do tend (now) to take the meta description providing it covers the query term.

Where it is most common to see a non-meta-d snippet is when the query term is not referenced there. This occurs most often when either no meta-d is available or the same one is used site wide. Because a well written description covers what the developer/seo views as the keys to a page topic(s) it is commonly all that is shown. Any outlier terms are usually insufficiently weighted to overcome other pages optimised for them as primary content keys.

However, when a query inexplicably throws up an outlier page or because a query topic is sparsely covered or simply because a site has tremendous authority/trust/rank a mention of a term on page or in anchor text pointing to that page can be served up instead. This is especially bemusing in the case of synonyms or stemming.

As a widgetised example: a page on a major home lawncare authority site has a meta description that does mention 'turf' and it is used once in the content something like '...there is no accounting for such turf conditions...'. 'Accounting', naturally is not referenced in the meta-d.

A search query for 'bookie' returns that page on the basis of 'turf' and 'accounting' being within a certain proximity; 'turf accountant' being a synonym of bookie and 'accounting' and 'accountant' both stemming from 'account'. As the lawncare page meta-d is not relevant the snippet snips and displays '...there is no accounting for such turf conditions...'. Apparently, site weight, as opposed to relevance, can have a major input.

Algos are as stupid as they are powerful.

[Ron Carnell]

Given that searchers may put all sorts of long tail keyword searches together, I think that kind of loss of control is probably quite frequent.

You're probably right, Barry. The first time someone searches for a phrase you didn't consider optimizing for, I'd have to agree it represents a loss of control. If it happens a second time, however, that's an abandonment of control. And that might even be acceptable; how much effort a visitor is worth depends on the site. If it happens a thousand times, however, I think someone is definitely missing the boat. And it ain't Google.

All you have to do, for any keyword combination, is write a sentence of the appropriate length that contains all of those keywords. Put that sentence in your meta-description. That's it. If there's a limit on how many such sentences you can include in a meta-description, I haven't hit it yet (though, realistically, any page drawing more than a handful of related search queries probably needs to be better targeted).

We could spend weeks or months talking about how best to write that sentence, but getting Google to use it shouldn't take more than five minutes. It really is just that simple.

[bwelford]

Most interesting, Ron. I've tended to write descriptions that are only one sentence of less than 155 characters and spaces. I had not considered writing several such sentences. What's the maximum number of such sentences you have included in a single Description meta tag? Did Google most often just choose one of your sentences? .. or did it more often mix and match?

[Ron Carnell]

I generally have only two or three sentences in the meta-description, Barry, each of them as close to 155 characters as seems reasonable within the context of the page. I've had as many as 14 sentences, I think, but eventually broke that page up into multiple pages (which should have been done right from the start). And, yes, of course Google chooses just one of the sentences for its snippet -- just as it chooses one of your sentences from the content or concatenates smaller sentences when all else fails. Remember, though, the 155 char sentence must contain ALL the keywords in a query if it is to fully satisfy Google. Otherwise, you'll likely see ellipses. Google is very good at parsing full thoughts when the punctuation is correct, though, and much prefers good sentences.

There's nothing magical about the meta-description. It just happens to be first on the page, and Google looks for its snippets from top to bottom. Once Google finds what it wants, it stops looking. Our job is to give it what it wants (while simultaneously giving it what WE want for a good call-to-action).

For the record, Ammon and I have had a similar discussion before.

[Respree]

I pretty smart guy suggested to put your keywords at the beginning of the sentence. Assuming they don't use your meta, doing so will 'force' the snippet to appear in context with the words which succeed it (and read much better, like a whole sentence), rather than taking a chance of potential out of context snippet displays (i.e. the ellipsis).

[bwelford]

That really is an excellent thread, Ron. I missed it at the time since I was moving lock-stock-and-barrel from Eastern to Western Canada at the time. It's excellent preparation for this discussion.

As you may imagine, I've been watching snippets with more than usual interest during the last week or two. As you seem to confirm in that thread, the snippet process takes words a little more literally than does the general search algorithm with its more 'semantic' analysis.

I suddenly realized that however useful this multi-sentence approach might be with the Description meta tag, it might be a somewhat academic discussion for me at the moment. I'm using the All-in-one-SEOpack WordPress plugin that strongly suggests the Description meta tag should be limited to 160 characters. However I've just checked and you can put in whatever length of text you wish and it is correctly handled by the plugin. That's very encouraging.