Google now shows why it placed a specific result in SERP
It has not yet arrived in Europe, while in the United States it has already debuted a few months ago and now it also extends the information presented: let’s talk about the feature About This Result, introduced last February by Google to provide users with more details on the reliability of a site before the possible click. Now the small tab is enlarged and also reports a number of reasons why Google has chosen to place the page in SERP.
The Evolution of About This Result
The great and interesting news was announced on the The Keyword blog by Elizabeth Tucker, Product Manager of Google, and is already active for SERP in English in the United States, with the aim of extending its functionalities to other parts of the world in the coming months.
Clicking on the three dots to the right of the URL’s breadcrumb of the result placed appears a larger window, which provides much more information on the results that users are about to view in order to facilitate them in the evaluation on which page could be more useful and relevant to their intent, providing them, as a sign of reliability, a transparent overview of the reasoning that convinced Google to position that result.
Google unveils SEO reasons behind the ranking of a result
If to regular researchers it can be interesting to discover this information, the feature has a very different value for SEOs: for the first time, in fact, Google gives a reason about which ranking factors were taken into account and used to bring out that particular page for that particular query.
The ranking factors behind placement
More in detail, as you see also in the examples on the page, to decide the placement Google takes into account these factors, analyzed by Search Engine Land:
- Search terms that appear in the result
The web page contains the same search keywords and the algorithm has identified this matching between the words used in the query of the researcher and the keyword present in the content of the page. These matches may be present not only in visible content, but also in HTML, particularly in the title tag or other metadata.
- Search Related Search Terms