Google Orion Update

On March 24th Google rolled out new changes to the way in which it displays search results. These changes have been named Orion (after the company Orion that Google acquired  in 2006 which specialised in associative relationship search technology). Two changes to the search results can be observed.

The first change concerns the appearance of snippets. Snippets are portions of content that are taken from places where content closely matches the search query. Depending on the query, a snippet is taken from an area of the content that is related to the queries. Occasionally, snippets may be taken from the meta description or from the DMoz directory. Snippets can be as small as one line.

The new change has increased the length of some snippets to around three lines when the query is three more words. However it is not universal to each listing. Some sites are still not showing an increased snippet length.

Why is this important?

i) With longer snippets there is chance that for simple queries you might find the information that you were looking for without going to a site at all.
ii) The additional space taken up by the snippets is pushing more results below the fold. This could impact on the number of visitors to sites lower down the page making the top results more competitive than ever.

The second change is to give related searches below the search results. Typing a particular set of key phrases you could get ideas for keywords related to the these terms. These suggestions are the result of the Orion technology which uses an associative ‘knowledge’ relationship between different terms.

Some SEO specialists have proposed that this means you should concentrate on several different keywords in order to lever this change. However, the concept of knowledge of related information is useful to separate the artificial from naturally good content. Artificial content will tend to concentrate on a specific subject, repeating key phrases. Experts have a greater knowledge and will make more connections between related subject areas.

If you want to know some of the key phrases which Google considers connected with a query this could be useful for keyword research. However this connectedness should happen naturally if you do have good content. If you want to lever this change, then it is more important than ever to have good content and lots of it.