Interpreting Search Results as Listed in Google
Interpreting the search results in Google is important . We must understand what we are seeing in these search results. The example below shows a Google listing (or snippet) for our own website.
Note that there are some things we can do to try influence what is displayed here but Google has the final say on what information it displays. It is also worth noting that while your position in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) is crucial to your success, what is displayed there is also very important. If the snippet relays the right message then people will be more inclined to click through to your website.
Above we have displayed a copy of the snippet that appears when our UK web design company is listed in Google's results. We shall use this as an example to illustrate how to interpret the results.
- The top line of the above (in larger purple text) shows the Meta title (more later). This is also the actual Hyperlink, in other words the part that actually links to the website.
- The part in green is the URL (or the internet address) of the page.
- The "Cached" link is a link to the information that Google has stored in its cache for that page the last time it was visited by the search engine's robot.
- The next part (in plain text) is the description "snippet". In this case the description comes from the Meta Description that we wrote for the website (more later). Google will often use this but it can also select its description from other parts of the text on your website or in some cases from other websites that link to yours.
- The bottom line is sometimes included when a site is popular and has a lot of content. The link at the top takes you to the home page of the website. In this case (as above) Google selects a few popular internal pages from the site and offers direct links to them.
The above information is as applied to the displayed results in Google at the time of writing. Google now changes the presentation of its results on a more regular basis and sometimes they do it differently in different counties. When you read this they may differ slightly from the above. This description should however help you to interpret the search results now and in the future. The other large search engines use similar methods.
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