Google’s New Search Snippet
In September 2019, Google released its new search snippets. Google’s new search snippet lets site owners customize how their search snippets are displayed. You will be able to have featured snippet opportunities that could feature long-tail keywords from your keyword research.
Google has released the new snippet settings, allowing webmasters to control how Google search displays website listings. These settings will work either through a set of robots, meta tags, and an HTML attribute.
New Meta Tags to Setting Snippets
You will now be able to add the following four meta tags to either an HTML page or specified via the x-robots-tag HTTP header. That will create structured data around your blog post on your results page.
The new types of featured snippets:
● “nosnippet”: – This is an old option and it has not changed. It lets you specify that you do not want any textual snippets shown for this page.
● “max-snippet:[number]”: – A new meta tag that will let you specify a maximum text length, in characters, of a snippet for your page.
● “max-video-preview:[number]”: – This new meta tag will allow you to specify a maximum duration in seconds of an animated video preview.
● “max-image-preview:[setting]”: – This is a new meta tag that you are able to specify a maximum size of image preview to be shown for images on this page, using either “none”, “standard”, or “large”.
Combination of Meta Tags
You can use these meta tags individually or standalone but you can also combine them if you want to both control the max length of the text and video, giving you the ability to optimize your content further.
Here is an example:
HTML Attribute
Another benefit is that you can use the above snippet tags as HTML attributes and not as meta tags. Doing so allows you to prevent the part of an HTML page from being shown within the textual snippet on the page.
Here is a code sample of how this might look:
Harry Houdini is undoubtedly the most famous magician ever to live.
Non-Google Search Engines
As far as we understand, Bing and other search engines are not currently supporting any of the new snippet settings. Google just came out with support for these new settings, fully releasing this update at the end of October 2019.
Featured Snippets
When it comes to Google, keep in mind, if you restrict Google from showing certain information, it may impact if you show up for featured snippet results. This could also impact how your rich results look, as well.
Featured snippets require a certain minimum number of characters to be displayed, and if you fall below that minimum, it may result in your pages not qualifying for ranking high as the featured snippet. You will want to familiarize yourself with the protocols that Google now has set into place with this newest feature.
When using the new markup, site owners will be able to customize various search snippet attributes. Attributes could include the maximum length of a snippet, the length of video previews, and the size of thumbnail images.
The new markup can also be used to restrict entire sections of text from appearing in a snippet, for those who don’t want to give away too much information in the SERPs.
Implementation
For SEOs and site owners who have already gone ahead and started implementing the markup, you will start to see the changes reflected in search results in a little over a week.
Those who have not yet implemented the markup can, of course, will be able to do so at any time. The changes will be reflected the next time Google crawls your website. You are able to of course have Google crawl your site in order to see those changes sooner rather than later.
AMP Larger Images
Google will allow you to control what size impacts are shown in your AMP results, like top stories and other areas. Google said publishers who do not want Google to use larger thumbnail images when their AMP pages are presented in search and Discover would be able to use the above meta robots settings to specify max-image-preview of: “standard” or “none.”
Directives
According to Google, the new search snippets will be directives that Google will follow. Unlike other codes, it is going to be followed, as opposed to being hints that it will consider but might ignore.
Preview Tool
Unfortunately, there is no real way to preview how these new snippet settings will work in a live Google search. Therefore, you will need to implement it and wait (patiently) for Google to show them. You are able to use the URL inspection tool to expedite crawling. Once Google has crawled it, you should be able to see the revised snippet in the live search results, allowing you to go back and edit it as needed.
Rankings On SERP
Utilizing these snippets will not impact your overall Google web search rankings. Google will still crawl, index, and rank your pages as it did previously. It may impact your listing from showing up with certain rich results from search queries. Could have an impact on your site showing up as featured snippets, as we described above. But this will not impact your overall rankings on the Google search engine results page, SERP.
Lastly, it’s important to state: this update is not designed to affect the search rankings of sites that utilize the new markup. The new markup will only affect how snippets from the site are displayed in the search results.
Gone Live
Google announced that this will go live in mid-to-late October. Of course, Google announced that this feature was live on its Twitter account at @googlewmc. Like any new feature on Google, this could take time to fully roll out, possibly over a week, within a month it will be global. This is exciting news and will allow for more customization for the snippets.
Why We Care
SEOs, webmasters and site owners have continually wanted was more control over what Google shows for their listings in the Google search results. These new settings will give you more flexibility in terms of what you prefer to show in your SERP snippets and what you do not show up in Google.
Blue Water Marketing has a team that can maximize your search snippets, to create a more powerful message. Contact us today to see how we can improve your SERP.
Boosting Content Marketing ROI
There is no one tactic that is going to gain you more ROI from content, but rather a sleuth of actionable steps. All the above items are interconnected, just like a spider’s web. Each part is important and none will do it all. This is a content marketing strategy at work.
If you pour all your focus into one part of content marketing, you will lose the big picture. Do not look at it as if you are looking through a microscope, look at the forest, not the trees. With hard work and patience, the ROI will come.
Blue Water Marketing is able to create a content marketing plan that achieves the above actionable items. Contact us today to see how we can make a difference in your content marketing ROI.
