Google search snippets are slightly different when you put quotes around your queries. Learn more about what’s changing in today’s announcement.
“We’re improving citation searches,” Google search software engineer Yonghao Jin says in a blog post.
Now when you put quotes around a word or phrase in a query, the snippet contains a snippet of text from the page where the quote appears.
Advertising
Here’s an example code snippet that might appear for a query containing “Google search”:
Image credit: Screenshot from blog.google/products/search, August 2022.
Google notes that bolding quoted text only appears in desktop search results.
Prior to today’s update, Google aimed to serve search snippets describing the page rather than identifying quoted text.
“Creating a snippet around sections like this might not produce an easily readable description,” Jin continues.
Now, Google is listening to comments from searchers who say they’d rather see where quoted text appears.
What does this mean for your website?
Today’s update to search snippets for quoted text only impacts how results are displayed in Google. It does not affect how web pages are ranked in Google.
However, this update could have an impact on the number of clicks your pages receive from Google search.
Google points out that this change benefits searchers because they can get what they’re looking for more easily and quickly.
On the other hand, web publishers may not find the change as beneficial.
If people can get the snippet they’re looking for directly in Google, isn’t that less of a reason to visit the page itself?
It’s too early to tell what impact this change will have on click-through rate, if any, but it was a concern that immediately came to mind when I read Google’s announcement.
Other Notes on Cited Research
New Google snippets for cited searches may not appear when there are multiple cited terms in the same query. If the terms are far from each other, Google will show one of them in the snippet.
If the quoted text appears multiple times on a page, Google will show the most relevant occurrence in the snippet.
Finally, it should be noted that quoted searches do not work for local results. If you enter a query with quotes that triggers the display of a local area, Google will not limit results to pages containing the text in quotes.
Source: Google
Featured Image: nerosu/Shutterstock