Google set to make major changes to results pages

Luke Meredith

Google has announced a major overhaul of its search engine results page’s formatting set to come into effect over the next few months, with a greater emphasis on a multimedia-focused layout.

Announced at the 2022 Google Search On event last week, the updated results page will feature content types such as images and videos incorporated directly into search results. According to Google’s Vice President of engineering, Rajan Patel, the update serves to better reflect current searching trends among users.

Google’s search results overhaul may come as a result of suggestions that multimodal social media platforms such as TikTok are overtaking Google as an effective search engine, due to their ability to present search results through written, visual and audio modes extremely quickly. Google may hope that its new update will quell these trends and firmly re-establish it as the undisputed dominant search engine.

Of course, it’s natural to assume that a drastic change to Google’s search formatting such as this is bound to have implications from a search engine optimisation (SEO) perspective, with website owners perhaps worrying whether this will affect their search rankings. On this matter, Patel said:

“We find the most useful content is authentic to users, high-quality and topical. With these changes, we’re looking to surface more authentic content in different formats. You’ll start to see richer, visual content surface more in Search over time.”

Patel’s thoughts seem to echo Google’s current general SEO approach, with a particular emphasis on helpful content instead of potentially misleading websites.

According to Google, the updated search results page will initially be introduced to U.S mobile users, before being extended worldwide and introduced to desktop machines in due course. If you want to make sure your website can rank highly on search results despite any changes made by Google, here at Engage Web, we can help you get the absolute best out of your SEO efforts. Contact our team today to get started.

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Luke Meredith

Content Editor at Engage Web

At home in both the digital sector and the world of communications, Luke thrives on deadlines and has held roles in healthcare, retail and digital marketing, gaining a sound knowledge of a wide range of sectors. He’s a massive swot as well, holding a first-class degree in BA Communication and Media, and now uses his writing skills and keen editorial eye in his role as Content Editor here. Luke helps to oversee our clients’ content requirements, while also looking after a pool of freelance writers across three continents.

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Google set to make major changes to results pages