Years ago I would have jumped on this and see if I could modify it for self promotion but I must be getting sensible in my old age.
Look at the first organic listing and see how apparently easy it is to crack even Google’s own SERP listing in Google.co.uk listings.
Some free advertising for coinflation.com and (after 10 seconds investigation) all because they linked to Google Adwords. :)
I wonder if it is legal to intentionally modify a web sites Google serp snippet – just by taking advantage of the way Google handles links sometimes, or the way a web page or server is configured? It’s probable that this is accidental too….
How would you modify a site’s serp snippet? Naturally, I took a look at the coinflation site. I see it shows that the base metal value of a 1909 to 1982 US cent (which is 95% copper) is two and one third times its face value. So depending on how expensive (or legal) it is to melt US coins and how easy it is to find them, it seems the better choice would be to forget about SEO and just melt the cents – and the dollars will take care of themselves ;-) Seriously though, thanks for the article. It encouraged me to look in detail at what the ‘>>’ tabs at the side of our site’s search result show. Google has extracted certain sentences out of our site and displayed those against the relevant pages. The extracted sentences are good choices, and it’s interesting to note what a good job Google’s ‘extract-something-sensible’ tool did. More than that, because we are doing a redesign, I hope it will help us avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater and to keep sentences that are a good fit for us and that Google has already snippeted (is that a word?).
It depends on if the target server is set up to block Googlebot, or redirect in a funky way……
Tried to duplicate this but it seems it has already vanished (at least on http://www.google.com ip address 173.194.66.103). Maybe this article had something to do with that? Also noticed that the autosuggest drop down is different. I get tool, certification, coupon. I wonder if this is based on my personal usage? Perhaps google uses known search habits to autosuggest specifically for that user? Thanks Shaun. Barney
Google autosuggest is definitely geo-location specific mate…… :)
Hi Shaun, I’m in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK. You really think it makes that much difference? We’re not that far apart. Barney
I think it does – I remember testing it out a while back.