Google to introduce search changes

Small businesses should be up to date with new changes from Google that affect how the company’s search process picks content from sites to display on a user’s results page, SEO experts say.

The changes, described by the Google Snippit team on the company’s official blog, explain how the new search process uses content from sites to create new links on a users’ results page.

On a normal search page, a summary of a site’s content will be placed under that site’s link to give a user an idea of what will appear in that page. But the Google Snippit team says two major changes have been made that affect how these summaries work.

The first is that these summaries will now contain links that will direct a user to relevant locations within a page that relate to the user’s original search. Search results will appear as normal, but more links will appear under each heading that lead to different locations within that website.

The second change is more search-specific. If a user searches for a specific query like “Good cholesterol level” as part of an investigation into bodily health, any site that contains information about that specific phrase will contain a link to the relevant content within the site’s summary on the main results page.

Chris Thomas, chief executive of SEO firm Reseo, says this is a development SMEs need to consider when designing websites.

“This is something that webmasters should think about, particularly if you have pages with large amounts of content. This is very interesting, and pages with lots of content will benefit the most from them.”

Jim Stewart, chief executive of Stewart Media, says this is an interesting development but businesses shouldn’t become confused and change their strategy altogether.

“This really gets to the same thing that I tell my clients. Make sure your content is structured properly, make sure you get all your headings right, make sure they are linked properly.”

The Google Snippit team said in the blog post webmasters need to consider how their pages are structured when taking the search changes into account.

“There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections.”

“Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (ie. not just “Section 2.1”), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors.”