Tweet Pin It by Divya Fernando - 12/19/2011 5583 Views
People often say that God works in mysterious ways, I am sure the webmaster version of it would be Google works in mysterious ways. Google webmastercentral blogspot has come up with the latest update on 'Google Algo Alert' which is none other than our text snippets that appear on search. Google now says that it is quintessential for them to make it clear for their web users to understand and know what is within a website even before they click it. They need to assess websites with respect to the quality and relevance of the rich snippets that is contained in each website search result. Rich Snippets really do matter and it is obvious to us when we ourselves are looking for a certain information online. With limited time to scan through each website and by just scanning through the rich snippets instead we tend to choose those that offer relevant and all-inclusive information. So, it literally means that even if you gain Google No. 1 position for a particular keyword, unless you have a rich snippet that spells relevance and engages curiousity, the probability of your target searcher turning into a web visitor reduces considerably and there would be no question of positive conversion rates. For now, lets call the number of visitors skipping your website search appearance as pre-bounce rate and you certainly do not want this number to increase as it is as damaging as the bounce rate on your website. Luckily, Google webmastercentral blogspot also shares a link where you can study the manner in which rich snippets are produced for a variety of niche sites and get ranked accordingly. The real question, however is, does Google really analyze rich snippets with their algortihmic bots or do they have this as a ranking criteria to make it simpler for their human rankers. Well, for all those who din't already know, Google hires human rankers to rank websites and give a non-technical ranking or analysis of website's quality and relevance. These rankers are provided with keywords for which they have to execute a simple Google search and filter out all those sites that do not provide relevant content but still rank at a position they do not deserve. Most of these rankers have to complete ranking of a number of websites within a hour or two, so it is rumored, that they just pass on their comments on various website's based on the rich snippet alone, that appears on the search results. Google, however, has confirmed that they do not rely on such findings and no human ranker can decide the web page rank of a certain website, but the truth is, it does in a minisclue manner affect your site rankings. In conclusion, all I would advice is better be safe with providing a rich snippet that encompasses everything that your potential pre-web visitor needs to see and enhance your web visitors user experience to attain more conversion rates and to be in the good books of search engines like Google.