Search-Engine Teaser Snippets

Robert Crowther Dec 2022
Last Modified: Feb 2023

Summary

Intro

Search engines list links to further webpages (usually). These links are formed as a title. A mature search‐engine will, underneath most links, place some teaser text. This explains the link further. Google uses the word ‘Snippets’ to describe this text.

Note about this site!

Don’t expect high quality teaser text from this site! In content, if not in form, this is a blog site. I’ve never concerned myself with providing description data here—the content is scattered. If anything, the site works as a test‐bed for how search‐engines make their decisions.

How important is teaser text?

Most important is a nice linked title. You can find many pages online which describe how to write emotive titles that ‘click‐grab’. But sites that have no interest in this would usually want a small title that accurately represents the content of the link.

There’s probably research on how effective the teaser text is—I havn’t found it. For myself, I’d say the text is not as important as the title, but is important. It helps a person looking at web results decide if a link is worth following. And following links uses time and organisation. Mature search engine results can include much extra information such as a full URL address, a logo, further links and data. But of them all, I would think the teaser text is the most important to cause a user to click on the link.

How is teaser text picked?

Originally, the meta‐tag for webpages titled ‘description’ was used,

<meta name="description" content="The page that fixes the drains while making you coffee.">

Because SEO people wanted to gain their credit, these tags became stuffed with keywords. And that was the advice given. This worked partly because Google made it’s exceptional search results not only by gathering links, but by tracking one site to another, A list of keywords helped search‐engines establish connectivity.

But heaping keywords could be misleading or manipulative. So search‐engines became canny about this, and started ignoring meta‐descriptions in favour of finding text themselves. They would find text by hunting through the webpage.

Current state of play?

Well, I’m mainly going to talk about Google. Google is the search‐engine that currently is most important. But I’m sure many of the comments will apply to Yandex, Bing, Yahoo etc.

My experience is that Google now largely ignores the meta‐tag ‘description’. They say,

Google will sometimes use the “description” tag…

My experience is that, quality of description aside, Google tends to ignore the tag.

Instead, Google will root round. Far as I can figure, the robots are looking for,

Google also expands descriptions. If it finds what it feels is a good description, but is short, it will supplement with extra text from the webpage.

Sometime, Google robots have grabbed text from deep inside the page, using little more than a list item as a key.

Where to place teasers

I’m beginning to think, despite the comment on Google help, that the ‘description’ meta‐tag is often ignored. Also, Google, at least, may construct more than one teaser, see below.

The Google robots seem to be much more favourable to descriptions set in structured markup. I’ve provided accurate, interesting descriptions that were ignored when placed in meta‐tags. When I duplicated the descriptions in structured markup, they appeared in results. I dislike this a lot, as it is not DRY. What I can not tell you is if descriptions provided only in markup are favoured. But this is worth considering.

As for where Google looks for text, I make this so devious it’s not worth organising webpages for this. I have many webpages organised in classic web‐form, but with different structures. Google seems to use many methods, at times compiling it’s own list of keywords.

Sample teaser lengths

Lengths are supposed to vary depending on device and search‐engine. Lengths are given in characters‐with‐spaces. Length is measured until ellipse. Mobile text,

Google

156

Duck Duck Go

350

Desktop text,

Google

156

Duck Duck Go

350

Maybe content lengths nowadays are largely independent of device? The text is easy to abbreviate.

Lengths used to be advised at no more than 64 chars. It’s plain that now 128 chars at least will be displayed on screens as small as a mobile.

Teaser text results differ

This is interesting—on Google snippet contents are different for desktop and mobile. Current working theory, Google chooses snippets for desktop as described above. And the robots are favouring text with weight and length. However, for mobiles, the robots favour a shorter description (especially if unique, information rich, a sentence etc.). On mobile and my experience, the robots are more likely to choose contents of ‘meta description’ tags.

What do others do?

Wikipedia, main English page

no meta. Against what I say above, relies on search‐engines to find the first words on the main page. However, contains big chunks of structured‐markup

Guardian

meta tag. structured‐markup but does not duplicate the description

YouTube

meta‐tag only

Amazon

meta‐tag (and keywords meta‐tag) only

Samsung

meta‐tag only

Reddit

meta‐tag only

Wordpress

meta‐tag, copied into a ‘property’ meta‐tag, and structured‐markup

Clearly, large websites do not have the difficulties I’ve experienced with meta‐tags. WordPress alone feel it is worth emphasising description text.

Samples

From home pages,

YouTube

“Enjoy the videos and music that you love, upload original content and share it all with friends, family and the world on YouTube”

Samsung UK

“Welcome to Samsung UK. Discover a wide range of home electronics with cutting‐edge technology including TVs, smartphones, tablets, home appliances & more!”

Reddit

“Reddit is a network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies and passions. There’s a community for whatever you’re interested in on Reddit”

WordPress

“Open source software which you can use to easily create a beautiful website, blog, or app”

None of these large sites are using shorter descriptions.

Related activity

Do not show a teaser,

<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet"/>

Limit teaser length,

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:150">

Refs

Google advice on teasers,

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet#meta-descriptions