http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/two-new-improvements-to-google-results.html The first improvement makes me think it's getting more important than ever to not only focus on your major keyword phrases but instead to also focus on clusters of related keyword phrases. IMO it would likely improve click-thrus and conversions if you ranked in the top 10 for not only a particular keyword phrase but also for some or most of the related keyword phrases that Google will be displaying. I have been trying to do this for some time, but now that Google will be steering users to particular related phrases, a growing percentage of consumers will be more likely to pick one from the list and less likely to enter their own manually as they refine their searches. It will be interesting to see which related phrases Google comes up with for particular searches. I wonder how closely they might coincide with the related keyword phrases displayed in Googe Insights (http://www.google.com/insights/search) for the last 30 or 90 days.
Good spot! I'm seeing the additional Related-Search suggestions, but it looks like the meta descriptions are still limited at 155 characters. Is anybody else seeing a change in the length of meta descriptions? Got a character count?
Nevermind, I just tried searching for one of their examples: "earth's rotation axis tilt and distance from sun" The longest snippet is 310 characters, including spaces. Hopefully this new SERP's spec also applies to meta descriptions.
The longer snippets will only appear when the user searches for a long keyword phrase that has several 'real' keywords in it (not 'of', 'the', 'and', etc.). I just searched for a phrase containing 8 keywords and found a snippet with 233 characters displayed before it was truncated w/ the elipses.
As has pretty much been the case at Google in the past, if your <meta> description element contains all of the keywords from the search phrase, I'll bet they continue to display your <meta> description. But if your <meta> description only contains some of the keywords from the search phrase, they will likely construct one from the content of the page so that they can highlight all of the words from the search phrase. This might mean constructing a good <meta> description just got harder. The first 140-150 characters targeting the main keywords your page is targeting. The next 200 or so targeting the ancillary words that might be added to your main targeted keyword phrase to turn it into a long tail search. Or perhaps just do as you always have done and let Google construct one for the longer tail searches. Will be interesting to see what people come up with.
I hope that's the case, it'd be nice to have a longer meta description, should help improve CTR's in the top spot if it's compelling enough. I noticed in the upper right hand corner of the SERP's, the text that says "Displaying Results 1-10 of about...". The search query shows up after that text and is hyper-linked to Answers.com. Does anybody know if that is another change they've made in the SERP's update or has it been like that for a while?