A British based SEO during the week, stumbled upon yet another Google test. This one is far more interesting than Google Instant. As impressive as Google Instant is, it’s impact on search behaviour / ranking is minimal. This latest change however is not. It allows users to preview a target page before they click. This change will affect your click through rates.
Another change that seems to be happening is the way multiple entries from the same site are being displayed. Patrick Altoft who first saw the preview testing, thinks these two changes are related because he is seeing them at the same time. We’re already getting the multiple entry results here in Australia without the preview and snippet.
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Couple of things that immediately spring to mind with the preview feature-
1) Will G respect the no-cache directive? Some sites allow G to fully index their paid content because they know that only a few sentence snippets are going to be shown in the SERPs. Will G still show a preview, this time including multiple sequential sentences, images, layout etc?
2) What happens if there’s a page which has useful information, but it’s concise or simple? Will G “preview” the entire page, completely obliterating any reason for the surfer to click through to the site?