Featured snippets

Mini sitelinks are probably the most unpredictable element of a search snippet. Google may randomly pick links from navigation, tag, or category links, etc. There’s also no way to tell Google they made a poor choice.

They can be generated for just about any result out there.

Mini site...

Google used to rely on the page title to generate the title of the search snippet, but it has been rewriting that part more and more often recently.

That being said, it is still recommended to optimize your title to include keywords and entice more clicks — and hope Google will keep it inta...

Structured snippets are less popular than rich snippets, even though they are very common on search.

Structured snippets import tabular data to formulate a more informative search snippet.

All it takes to qualify for this type of a snippet is to create an HTML table. It is a good idea...

The anatomy of a standard search snippet

The standard Google search snippet has changed over the years, but in essence all the key elements are still there:

• The clickable title or headline of the snippet (in blue)
• The description of that page (about two lines long)

Rich snippets are search snippets enhanced with some additional details. Web publishers can control rich snippets by adding schema markup, so they are thus under website owners’ control.

FAQ

HowTo schema

Video schema

These days, Google will do its best to show the meaningful URL path (almost like a breadcrumb) instead of simply the URL of the page. This consists of:

• The domain: Domain name may impact clickthrough (if you do a particularly good job picking a snappy domain name that intrigues) & yo...

Google has been generating the search snippet description for years without using the associated meta description: recent studies show that Google ignores meta descriptions in about 70% of cases.

You may still want to create meta descriptions in case Google needs some clues, but expect them...

Dates in search snippets are important clickthrough factors.

• People may click on a search snippet with a more recent date.
• They can scroll past an older date even when the page ranks higher.

Google has clear guidelines as to how publishers can keep dates fresh: