Understanding Google Search Engine Results Pages

As the most used Search Engine on the planet, you would either expect Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to be user friendly and simple to understand or come with a help page. It is my goal, with the help of Google's Own Matt Cutts, to explain the mystery behind these SERPs and more importantly how to use them for better marketing. You can see Matt Cutts' video explanation here.

Note that the image to the right, which is referenced in this discussion, can be viewed in greater size by clicking on it. If nothing appears your browser may be blocking popups.

Sponsored Links

Early on Google saw the potential for great earnings by offering Sponsored Links or Pay Per Click (PPC) listings on their SERPs. These ad spots provide a quick way to see your website listed in priority positioning without the wait of generic search engine optimization.

Originally these PPC ads appeared only on the right side of the SERPs. After many studies were run Google quickly learned that people were more inclined to see and click on ads listed on the top left of the page. By making this transition Google increased their ad earnings exponentially. You will notice if you look closely at the image above that the background of the Sponsored Links at the top of the page have a light orange colored background. This background used to be much brighter, but people were less inclined to trust a sponsored listing than the organic listing just below the ad. Again, Google's profits increased by blurring the distinction between these listings. Never forget that even though Google's search tool is free for people to use, these SERPs are there for Google's profits.

Organic Listings

The organic listings are those that make up the bulk of the SERPs. These listings are created by Google sending out its spiders, or Googlebots, to study websites and report back their findings for use on the SERPs. This site goes into greater detail helping you to increase your visibility in the organic listings, but this article merely explains the SERPs themselves.

Title

In the image on this page you will notice that the organic listing has the title, "Starbucks Homepage". This is the only part of the listing that you have complete control over. Even the PPC ads provide less absolute control. This title is taken from the page title tag of the page being listed. In this case the page title of Starbucks' home page.

Description

Just below the title is the listing description. There appears to be three options for the text displayed in the description:

1) The description meta tag on the page being listed,

2) text taken from the page that better matches the search words used in building the SERP page. Or

3) the description found on the Open Directory's http://dmoz.org listing.

Unfortunately we have no control for which option Google uses for their description text.

Cached

The Cached link provides quite a bit of data. Firstly, the text on this cached section is the text that the Googlebot saw when last studying the page. The date of that spidering should be listed. This can be helpful in seeing what text the spider can see. It is also beneficial if for some reason you ever lose a page on your website due to technical difficulties. From the cached section there is another link allowing you to see the page as a web browser might see it.

Similar pages

These similar pages are pages that Google deems as similar in nature to the page listed on the SEPRs. These results can sometimes be quite interesting and even leave you confused or concerned as to what Google is thinking by listing these results as similar to your page.

Stock quote

If Google believes that a website is the official site for a company that is listed on a stock exchange then the Stock quote link is provided for easy reference. As is the case with most of the data on the SERPs this option is created automatically by Google's programs.

Subsections

The group of eight links below the description are subsections of a website as Google understands them. These sections are created by Google using completely automated methods. At this point in time nobody has any control over these.

More results

This is a handy tool. By clicking the More results link Google will display other pages that they have indexed for the website. In this case, 4310 additional pages. Starbucks is a large site indeed.