New-style site hierarchies in Google SERPs

Monday 30 November 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Never content to rest on its laurels, search giant Google has been treading the innovation path yet again, this time addressing the way that it delivers site hierarchy information in its results pages.

Google's SERPs (search engine results pages) usually show a URL in green at the bottom of each search result, indicating where the user will be directed if the link is clicked. In a post on The Official Google Blog on 17 November, Software Engineers Harvey Jones and Daniel Rocha announced a new way to display this information, replacing the URL in some search results with a hierarchy that shows the exact location of the page on the site concerned. Their blog post explains:

"The new display provides valuable context and new navigation options. The changes are rolling out now and should be available globally in the next few days."

Often, URLs are too long, too short, or just too obscure to add any useful information for the search engine user. As an example, the blog post cites this result from the site ProductWiki for the query 'spidersapien reviews':

Google Site Hierarchies

The URL, shown in green, does little to add information about either the site or this result. In contrast, the new site hierarchy display is much more useful:

Google Site Hierarchies

Now the user can easily see that ProductWiki has information about various products, organised in categories, and it's even clear that Spidersapien is a robot toy. And here's the really clever bit – each phrase in the green text is actually a separate link, so clicking on 'Toys & Games' takes the user to ProductWiki's listing page for toys, while clicking on 'Robots' brings up a list of the site's robot toys.

The host and domain for the website concerned will always be shown, so that users will know which website they are heading for before clicking. If there is insufficient space to show the complete hierarchy, Google will use ellipses to replace some of the intermediate levels, like this:

Google Site Hierarchies

Explaining the technology, Jones and Rocha write:

"The information in these new hierarchies comes from analysing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you'll see a series of similar links at the top, 'Home> Toys & Games> Robots.' These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called 'breadcrumbs', which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analysing site breadcrumbs, we've been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future."

Back to industry news