Google use longer snippets and scrap the description tag
Posted by owen | Filed under Updates
Google have decided that the best way to serve long tail queries is to remove the use of the description tag in the SERPs and replace it with a longer snippet taken from the text on page.
“When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page.” See the Google blog for details.
This is to better serve long tails by showing the context of all the keywords used in the long tail search. So what about the description?
Well looking at the example below we can see the Description has clearly been replaced in the SERPs by the more relevent on page content:
The top search result (ignoring the misplaced web definition result) has content taken from on page and not from the description, which does not contain the keyphrase.
So what happens where there is the keyphrase on page and in the description, what will Google pull? Well it appears to be the the on page content which wins again, so forget that nice clean description tag you had with an exact match:
Now Google are increasing the leangth of that snippet where needed to show the user the context of the information within the SERPs. The problem with that is the user no longer needs to visit the page to find the information they are looking for. Google will helpfully find it on page and show it to them in the SERPs. This could be a problem.