The Anatomy and Evolution of Google Search Results Listing

From its onset, Google search struck (and appealed to) everyone due to its simplistic white-background interface.

Years have passed, and Google has been experimenting with various (slight) interface changes, advanced search options and different listing components. This article is about the evolution of the latter: let’s take a look at what each Google search result listing consists of, and how it has been changed throughout the years.

First, a short overview of what this article is going to be about (you can jump to each specific section using the links in the table):

Main Section	Sub Section	Sneak Peek
The Core: Linked Title, Page Description and URL	Listing Title and Description (Snippet): Basic Info	How listing titles and snippets are created, and their basic characteristics.
	The Evolution of the Core SERPs Elements	How titles and snippets have been changed (especially recently), including: adding breadcrumbs, dates in snippets, longer snippets, synonyms support, etc.
In-Site Navigation from SERPs	Google Sitelinks: Basic Info	The theories behind Google sitelinks and examples.
	Search within Search	How Google introduced “Teleportation” for “brand/domain-specific searches”
	Mini (One-Line) Sitelinks	How one-line sitelinks were introduced
	Named (HTML) Anchors-Enhanced Navigation	How “Jump to” navigation links from within search snippets were introduced and what determines them
	“Show more results from…”	The characteristics of a recent introduction: the “show more from a domain” option
Rich Snippets	An overview with examples of Google’s rich snippets
User Tools and Personalized Tools	User tools (“Cache” link and “Related” link) as well as personalized tools for logged-in users (triggered from Google bookmarks and search history)

1. The Core: Linked Title, Page Description and URL

These elements have been the core of Google search results page since its early age, and are the oldest elements of Google’s SERPs as we know them.

Google’s creation of sites’ titles and descriptions (or “snippets”) is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web (source).

1.1. Listing Title and Description (Snippet): Basic Info

Where are the elements generated from?

Linked Listing Titles are usually grabbed from the page <title> tag, and is usually 70 characters long. The search phrase is in bold. If the original page title tag is longer than that, the listing title is stripped:

Note: In some cases (usually when Google can’t access the page itself because of being blocked by a Robots.txt file), the listing title can be generated from the external references like Dmoz listing (or if there’s no information about the page, the URL path will be displayed in place for the search listing title).

Page Descriptions (“snippets”) are grabbed from the page’s Meta Description. This is a method preferred by Google:

We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content.

Page snippets are usually two lines of text with search phrases highlighted in bold.

Note: If the page description is absent from the page or is completely irrelevant to the search query, Google will try and find the most relevant text snippet of the page to display. In some cases (for example for SITE: domain.com queries that simply list indexed pages from a particular site), the top text element (that comes on top in the page source code) will be displayed.

1.2. The Evolution of The Core SERPs Elements

1.2.1. 2009: Longer descriptions/snippets: It has been suggested that when you enter a longer query (more than three words), regular-length (two-line) snippets may not give you enough information and context. Therefore in those cases, the number of lines in the snippet will be increased to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page.

1.2.2. 2009: Site hierarchies (breadcrumbs) instead of green URL path (in some cases):

• The host and domain for the site are always shown, so you always know what website you’re going to before you click.
• If breadcrumbs are too long, you’ll see ellipses to replace some of the intermediate levels.

These hierarchies are grabbed from the original page breadcrumbs usage:

The above hierarchy in Google SERPs comes from the breadcrumbs we find on the page:

This post gives a great overview of the feature, and lists some characteristics that increase chances for a site to have breadcrumbs in Google listing for a particular query:

• URLs displayed as breadcrumbs in search results appear to occur mainly from long tail search queries;
• URLs that are displayed as breadcrumbs are shown for pages that don’t have very descriptive URLs.

1.2.3. Dates in search snippets:

Since 2008, users have been noticing dates added to the beginning of the snippets.

While this feature was overall well-received and appreciated (especially for forums and blogs), some people have been noticing weird things related to the feature: for some pages, the date showing in the search description appeared to be totally random (grabbed from the body of the post).

1.2.4. 2010: Results highlighted in bold include synonyms and closely related searches:

Google had been experimenting a lot with synonyms and related terms highlighting until the synonym search was announced to be a default one. Whenever you search for something, you will see closely related terms returned and highlighted in search results:

Google has admitted that the system is not perfect and even provides some tips on disabling the default behavior:

You can also turn off a synonym for a specific term by adding a “+” before it or by putting the word in quotation marks.

2. In-Site Navigation from SERPs

Apart from providing basic info on the URL the searcher might want to go to, Google has been trying to aid the users in getting a better understanding of the site and information structure.

These in-SERPs navigation aiding tools have always been described as privileges (granted to the most powerful) and these include:

• 2.1. Google Sitelinks;
• 2.2. Search within search
• 2.3. “Mini (one-line) sitelinks”
• 2.4. “Jump to” links;
• 2.5. “Show more results from…”

2.1. Google Sitelinks

Sitelinks are the links shown below some sites (usually on top of search results) and are meant to help users navigate the given site with ease:

Google won’t tell you what specifically determines which site is worth a bunch of sitelinks. There have been a lot of educated theories behind Google Sitelinks, the most popular of which are:

1. Domain authority (age and backlinks)
2. The link structure of each site (internal architecture)

What we know exactly from Google help is that:

• Sitelinks are completely automated
• Sitelinks can be disabled or blocked from your Google Webmaster Tools account

2.2. Search within Search

In 2008 Google revealed the search within search (officially called Teleportation) feature that presented users with a search box as part of the results to help them find the exact page they are looking for from the specific domain.

This feature occurs when there is “a high probability” that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site.

Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.

2.3. Mini (One-Line) Sitelinks

In April 2009 Google started experimenting with one-line sitelinks that unlike “classic sitelinks.” These:

• Show users some relevant sub-pages in the site (this means they are more query-dependent and may differ from query to query for the same domain, unlike classic sitelinks that are preset for each domain)
• Show for non-branded terms
• Can appear not only for top results as well as show multiple times on a single search results page
• Can show for subdomains and subfolders.

Note: since the introduction, Google seems to have decreased the number of one-line sitelinks. If back in 2009 you were able to see them for almost each search result for popular queries, now they are much rarer to spot (but can still appear for as low as 6-7 search results).

Later that year, it was observed that one-line sitelinks can link not only to other pages from the same domain, but even to different parts of the same page (which means they support HTML anchors).

2.4. Named (HTML) Anchors-Enhanced Navigation

In September 2009 Google rolled out another navigation aid: Jump to links powered by named anchors. The links within snippets anchor you down to a specific (more relevant) point on the page.

To be rewarded with a link like this in your search listing, you need to:

• Ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections
• Ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″)
• Make sure that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors

2.5. “Show more results from…”

In August 2010 Google rolled out a new search feature that allows users to find a large number of results within a single site. This feature is used for “queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain” – but we see it for various generic queries as well:

3. Rich Snippets

Rich snippets (officially introduced in May 2010) are the result of Google’s effort to create “useful and informative search results”. Rich snippets enable web masters to label their site ‘s structured data in a way that Google will best understand and display it in search results.

Webmasters can mark up their structured HTML content in any of three formats: microdata, microformats, or RDFa.

Most widespread example of rich snippets include:

Reviews:

Contact information:

Recipes:

Event schedules:

Finally, there’s a tool that allows you to see how Google might interpret and display your structured data (of course, there is no guarantee that the rich data will be displayed for your site, but at least you will know if there’s a chance):

4. User Tools and Personalized Tools

4.1. “Cache” link

The “Cache” link brings you to the stored version of the page. It generally can be used if the original page is down or restricted. SEOs also use the link to see when a page in question was last “cached” by Google (the more often Google re-visits and re-caches a page, the better).

4.2. “Similar pages”

The “Similar Pages” link brinsg you to the new search results page that lists “related results” – generated with help of the RELATED: search operator.

The RELATED: search operator used to be strictly based on co-citation (similar backlinks and backlink neighbors) but has been approved and become much more related in topic, rather than some spastic collection of loosely interlinked sites.

4.3. Bookmark

A little star next to the page title allows any logged-in user to store a page in Google bookmarks.

If you have stored a page in your bookmarks and tagged it there, you’ll see the tags right in the Google search results as well:

4.4. Visited

The tiny gray date (and possibly number of visits) next to a page title shows that you already visited this page in the past (and specifies when was the last time). The info is only displayed for signed-up users and is generated for those who haven’t disabled Google search history.

Have I missed any element of Google’s search listing? Please let me know!

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