Syntax of Search Engine Results
The primary purpose of any webmaster is to create a good site and drive traffic to the site from search engines. Search engine traffic is the real requirement for any site in order to survive strong in the internet and compete in the respective industry. Besides following various SEO techniques to improve the site ranking in the search engine result page, it is very important that every webmasters should know the information displayed in the search result pages. Every search engines frequently change their search results display to improve user experience. Here we analyze the latest search result format shown in the popular search engines.
Components of a Search Result
A search result consists of some or all of the below listed components depending on whether a home page or other page in the site is being displayed:
Page and Site Titles:
Page title is displayed if the search result shows the webpage. Normally it is the first line in the search result and shown in the format of “page title – site title”. Site title is also shown after the page title if you have selected the option “show site title in all pages” in your site settings.
Below is an example of Google search result showing page title and site title in the first line.
Meta Description:
This is the description shown in the search results to inform users regarding the content of the page. Description is normally picked from the meta description tags or any where from your page based on the relevancy.
Page URL:
This is an URL of the page shown in the search result. Below is an example of search result from Yahoo! showing the page URL.
Page URL with Geographic Setting:
In case if you set geographic setting in Google Webmaster Tools account then this page URL will also shows the country it is linked at the end of it. Below is an example of the site linked with the country “United States” as a geographic settings in Google Webmaster Tools.
Related Pages:
Search engines also shows additional information in the search result in addition to the relevant URL for the search string. All the search engines shows the cached page option along with search results, in addition Google shows similar page options shows the pages with similar content. Yandex search result also shows the more pages option showing “more pages” from the same domain. Below is an example of Yandex search result showing “more pages” option.
Favicon:
Yandex is the only search engine showing favicon of the site in the search results as shown in the above picture.
Last Crawled Date:
Baidu is the only search engine shows the last crawled date in the search results as shown in the below picture.
Blocked by Robots.txt:
Whenever a page content is blocked by a Robots.txt file, search engines still index the URL in the database and shows it in the search results. Below is an example of Bing search result showing the page blocked by Robots.txt with a description of “We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us:
Malware:
All the search engines shows an indication of the sites affected by the malware in the search results such as “This site will potentially harm your computer”.
