Earlier this week, Google announced its latest update to its search engine results pages, its adding helpful links to its ‘snippets’.
Over the last couple of months, Google has made many changes to its search results pages, including improvements to the snippets, and this latest update means that Google will now be providing a selection of different links within some of the search results to allow users to drill down into the most relevant section of the page listed.
For example, if you search for ‘UK SEO agency’ on Google, our listing (in second place due to some usurper…) shows links to specific sections of our site (see yellow highlight below):
This allows users performing quite a broad search to easily and quickly find the particular piece of information on a chosen page, without having to scroll down the entire page and read all of the information on it.
The more astute users will recognise a startling resemblance to the site links that are added to some sites. As shown below, the links shown for our site links exactly:
Unfortunately, you have no direct control over which links are chosen, although you can remove any that you are unhappy with in webmaster tools.
Another alteration Google has made is the addition of the “jump to” link, which provides a link to a section of a website that is more closely related to the search term entered. For instance, if a search is performed on a quite specific search term and there is a section on one of the pages in the search results, that is very closely related to that phrase, then Google will offer the option to ‘jump to’ that section of that page.
Both of these features allow users to quickly land on the section of a page that they are interested in, dependent on the detail of their query. Google will offer a selection of possible subtopics of interest on broad searches, and more relevant links for more specific searches, in order to prevent users having to scroll through endless amounts of potentially irrelevant information.
The deep links are dependent upon the structure of each individual page and are generated algorithmically, meaning that they could appear on any search result for any web page.
But there are some things that you can do to improve a sites chances of obtaining these deep links and they are as follows:
- Ensure that informative pages about several topics or subtopics are clearly broken down into well-structured sections.
- Create anchors for each section with a contents list at the top of each page that links to each individual anchor, and give each anchor a keyword rich title.
The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant searches where Google finds a section of a page that could be highly useful to the user, so they should not be expected to appear for every search entered.
It will be interesting to see what tweaks Google come up with next, but we’re sure there will be plenty more to come.
