Google Search Gets a Makeover

Card based design is growing more and more popular and now Google wants to get in on the action as well. Google wants to switch its mobile search results to a new design called „rich cards”. The new design is a direct successor to Google’s already popular rich snippets feature. But the makeover doesn’t stop there – Google’s planning to redesign desktop search results with a completely new layout.

Google Search Gets a Makeover

Rich snippets are search results composed from a preview of the page’s text as well as small pictures. Google doesn’t intend to replace rich snippets but only complement and build on them in order to improve user experience.

Rich cards will be displayed in a carousel format which is easy to navigate by simply swiping right or left. The carousel can show cards from different sites or the same site.

Webmasters are excited about Google’s makeover since it allows them to stand out in the search results and market their products more effectively. This new design based on rich cards can also improve organic traffic in some cases. Currently, Google is implementing the new layout for just two content categories: movies and recipes.

Content Categories Based on Visuals Will Experience The Change First

 These two content categories are perfect for this change – the visual nature of these categories will increase organic traffic for websites. Food site owners can create rich previews of their website’s content by featuring appealing images for each dish or recipe. The same applies to movie sites with graphics and posters.

The main difference between the original snippets and Google’s upgraded rich card snippets is simply the number of images which webmasters can features. Rich snippets were released 6 years ago and could feature just one image in search results. Nowadays webmasters will be able to feature a series of images with the carousel system.

Before you go mobile to check out Google’s new layout keep in mind that right now only people using the English mobile version of Google can see the rich cards layout. The new layout will also experience multiple changes and improvements as Google is experimenting with new ways of providing richer previews in their search results and it’s only a matter of time before other types of content will benefit from rich card snippets.

Google Webmaster Tools Gets Upgraded

Google also offers integration with the Google Search Console, also known as Google Webmaster Tools – site owners will be able to see data related to their rich cards. This will help them monitor search performance more closely. If you want to check out how the rich cards work in Search just head on to Google’s Search Gallery and see screenshots of mark-up type samples and cards.

Another interesting change is Google’s Knowledge Graph – this is the system that collects information about people, things and places in order to understand how they are all connected. Knowledge Graph cards will be placed inline, effectively prioritizing them over competing website. This leads to a more cleaner and simplified look for Google’s search results.

The new desktop search design has practical features as well – now users have to scroll down to see more results – Knowledge Graph cards for locations can take up a lot of space.

Here is the list of changes for Desktop Search Results:

• Wider tabs for News, Images and All tabs
• Sub-links will show up under the main result, in a group with the same cards
• Stories from the „in the news” list will appear in the same card
• The „people also search for” list will show up at the bottom of the search results page and not in the sidebar

Google’s new experimental layout will surely help site owners get noticed much easier in mobile search results and receive more organic traffic. It’s likely that the carrousels will replace written text more and more and the movement towards rich, image-based snippets as opposed to simple text content is obvious.