The good old Google search page has been the subject of many changes over recent months, and is now receiving a subtle but important change that may impact you.
According to the SEM Post, it has been widened from 500 pixels to 600, with decreases in the white space between the results and the panels that display on the right hand side.
So there is more room to display more information in the search results. It looks like the roll out landed in the UK this morning.
Impact to you - title tags and meta descriptions
Your visible title tags have now increased in size before Google Truncates them.
eg The below result for petrol stations show how our title tag and description were optimised for the old Google values which used to be around 55 characters. Add too much text and Google will truncate it with a "..."
The description tag is your ability to tell the world what your page is all about. Best practice used to be around 155 characters, after that it was truncated.
The second result from esso fuel finder shows the impact of longer title tags, and they are now displaying 74 characters before Google truncated it.
Both results clearly show that longer descriptions are now possible. It's not 100% clear what the new values are, SEM Post states:
"Descriptions have also increased by about 16-20 characters per line. The new description length per line is 100 characters.
However (important!) Google is still truncated the descriptions for many search results. This means that the overall description is only displaying 150-160 characters total right now, for a usual 2 line snippet."
This seems to be the case, sticking with the petrol station theme and looking at Thomson Locals results:
So the description field has increased, but Google for some reason truncates it half way down the second line, which upsets my ordered OCD world!
PPC Adwords impact
If you are using adwords, then check out your adverts. It looks like the titles and descriptions have increased for those as well. I've just amended some of mine and can now fit in an extra keyword.
I suspect this will start impacting bidding and prices, on top of the other recent adwords changes by dropping the right hand sponsor advert display in the search results.
Comparison - The old days and how it looks today
I think it looks crisper and less cluttered than old, but here's an a screen shot from a couple of years ago, underneath one from today. Select the images to see a large version.
It just emphasises the amount of changes Google is continually doing, so make sure you take a look at your own website and see if you need to make any amendments.
May 2016
June 2014
You can clearly see the wider search results, but look at some of the other changes in the last two years.
- Google author tag - showing your author image - now scrapped
- We were showing two right hand information panels due to the chaos of Google merging maps and Google+, which has now changed again!
- Google review stars and address snippets for your homepage - now gone
- Bold text titles - now gone and looks better having less bold IMHO
- Bold text for search terms - this is a recent one, Google now only bold's typed keywords in the URL, as opposed to the title tag and description as it used to.
Summary
Check out your title and description tags, and check how your sites look in the new style search results.
Any thoughts, problems, comments?
