by SEO & Affiliate Consultant
M. Thomson
With a position at the top to maintain, it's no surprise that Google is always making changes to its inner workings. And, just recently, we've noticed the introduction of 'show options', a feature that allows you to filter and display options within the search results.M. Thomson
Bigmouthmedia may have spotted another change that has been added under the radar: Google now appears to be testing the truncating of long URLs to show just sections that are related to the user search query.
New URLs
As you can see from the search result, the URL for bigmouthmedia's article has been truncated, but not at the end where we usually see it. It appears now that Google will truncate the URL to highlight keywords related to the user's query.
Old URLs
Bigmouthmedia tested this change within personalised and non-personalised search and both show the same results.
So what could this new development have on click through rates? Google, supported by other search engines, has always recommended keeping URLs to a minimal length. What's more, usability tenets dictate that users are most likely to click through on a URL that relates to their query.
This means that Google's change could increase click through rates for websites that use long URLs, such as newspapers which often add the title of the article into the URL. On the flip side, websites that made the effort to reduce URLs for the benefit of the user experience may be redundant now - at least for gaining extra click through rates in the SERPs.
Overall, bigmouthmedia would like to think that Google's change to URL truncation has been tested and implemented for the benefit of the user. We imagine Google found that users tend to click on search results partially based on their URL - a result that could be troublesome for the Mountain View search agency.
As a company whose end goal is to help the user navigate to content related to their query, paying less attention to longer URL sites may have prevented Google from always being able to do its job. Now that sites with lengthier, but keyword rich, URLs are being highlighted in a more searcher-friendly way, Google could be offering them a way to get the attention they deserve.
