San Francisco — Google has come up with a novel innovation that will surely rock the house down. The global search engine leader Google has improved its search results by adding links to different sections of Web pages, in addition to the traditional main Web page link. Now, people can click on the main link to go to the top of the Web page or instead go directly to a specific section, Google said Friday in an official blog.
Google gives the example of the search result for the Wikipedia entry for “Trans Fat.” The snippet offers links to History, Chemistry, Presence in food, and Nutritional guidelines. These are all sections of one page that the user can go straight to from the results page.
If a search is limited enough in scope so that Google can figure out more specifically the type of information the user is looking for, only one link to the relevant Web page section will appear.
Basically, it is a search within a search identical to the search within a domain feature which Google introduced not so long ago. The search snippets though would give you specific pages that are otherwise buried deep within the search results main page. These specific pages naturally answers the search terms that you used.
Google creates these links to page sections automatically using its algorithms to analyze Web page structure, the company said in a related announcement explaining these enhancements to webmasters.
Apparently, if you wish to increase the amount of calls to action for your webpages from Google results, you will need to alter what you can to cater to this new feature. Luckily, this is not a completely mysterious part of the algorithm (though the links are generated algorithmically) that Google is leaving you to figure out for yourself. However, webmasters can take steps to increase their chances that Google will serve up links to their page sections, wrote Raj Krishnan from the Google Snippets Team.
“First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name — i.e., not just “Section 2.1” — and that your page includes a “Table of Contents” which links to the individual anchors,” he wrote.
“We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money is not involved in any way, so you can not pay to get these links),” wrote Krishnan. “There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages.”
This is yet another enhancements in a long list of developments Google has made over the years to beef up and extend the usefulness of the much-maligned “10 blue links” of search results.
For example, an ongoing and broad “universal search” initiative has brought links to news articles, images, video clips, maps and other specialty pages to Google’s general Web search engine.
One thing to remember is that these new links would not appear for every search result. Google states whether they become visible or not depends on the specific query used to get to it. Ok, there is a bit of mystery there after all.