Cicero Rautenbach

Ever wondered where Google got the information it displays in it’s search results for a site from? I recently bumped into some information about the very subject. I found it useful as it hinted at what you can do to improve the quality of what is displayed for your site.

Since Starbucks deprived me of my favorite drink for 3 hours last night, let me pick on them. For the search “Starbucks Coffee” the following is displayed:

So where does this information come from?

Well first let me start with the disclaimer. Like everything related to Google search, this information can change at any time and it is true most of the time.

Note how the search terms Starbucks coffee gets BOLDED throughout the results.

The title “Google Homepage” is the title of the indexed web pace as found in the <title>….</title> HTML tag (<TITLE>Starbucks Homepage</TITLE>). Make sure you put something sensible in the title tag, not “Starbucks Homepage” but perhaps “Starbucks – Home of your favorite specialty coffee”.

Next comes the snippet: “Starbucks Coffee Company is the leading retailer, roaster and brand of specialty coffee in the world. The Company’s other brands enhance the Starbucks …“. This will normally taken from the contents of the HTML Meta Description tag. If this is not interesting enough or Goggle thinks there is something more interesting on your web page, it will grab this, even if it means putting it together from multiple places on the page. So the lesson is clear – Put something sensible in the Meta Description tag:

<meta name=“description” content=“Starbucks Coffee Company is the leading retailer, roaster and brand of specialty coffee in the world.

The Company’s other brands enhance the Starbucks Experience through best-of-class products, including Tazo Tea Company and Hear Music.”>

So what happens if this tag is not there or Google can’t read your web page (it may be down)? Google will consult the Open Directory Project to find some description for your business from there. So the lesson to be learned is: Make sure you add your site to Open Directory Project with sensible descriptions.

Or Google may just grab something that looks interesting from your page and put it up as the snippet.

Next we get the “Stock quote for SBUX”. Google recognizes Starbucks as a publicly listed company and adds this. If Google recognize an address for your company, it might also add a “View in Google Maps” here.

“www.starbucks.com/ – 25k -Cached – Similar pages – Note this”

Next comes the URL of the web page for this result (www.starbucks.com/) , the size of the page (- 25k) and a link to the last Google cached version of your page, other pages that Google think may be related to the subject matter on your page and the Note This which will make a copy of this result in the Google Notes application (-Cached – Similar pages – Note this)’. If you click on the Cached, you will see the date of the last Google crawl on the page.
The next section is the Site Links. These gets automagically identified and classified by Google algorithms. Google will change the link name to some standard names that it uses, for example Nutrition may be called Ingredients on your site. Google will recognize this information as Nutritional information and create the link that you see here. I have not seen any documentation on the different Site Links that Google will create and how it recognize these on your site.

Last but not the least we find “More results from starbucks.com »“. This is to prevent one site from dominating the search results. It will list only a few links and group the rest under this “More results from..” link. his ensures some diversity in the search results so that you see more than just the top ranked site on the first results page.

I hope that this throws some light on how the search results are made up and how to improve the quality of your result somewhat.