This is pretty big in my opinion. Google has announced two changes to SERPs, the first being an update to Search Refinements, but for me the bigger change is to the snippet display:

When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page.

I’ve always considered snippets to be important – they act as a draw, and a good snippet with a strong CTA can often improve click-through from the SERPs.

This change has only been announced today, but you can bet this was thoroughly tested and resulted in an improved user experience. Google is generally a master at iterative improvement to web UIs.

How Will This Affect Site Owners?

I think an impact that maybe hasn’t been considered is the impact on click-through rates. This change is bound to impact where click placement occurs. Here’s a scaled SERP image with fold mark at 700px:

Old Google SERP with 2 Line Snippet (gotta love the MISSING TITLE)

Now here’s a similar SERP with extended snippets:

New Google SERP with 4 Line Snippet

So the impact is an extension of the page height, and an increase in the top offset of each SERP listing.

Top 3 Consolidate Even More Clicks

The interesting issue is that we’re going from 4 to 3 organic listings above the fold based on average screen heights of 700px. I’ve run some random queries, while this change doesn’t affect every query over 3 words, it does affect quite a few of the tiny sample I tried.

There’s obviously some informational threshold below which the extended snippet isn’t displayed, so while it may not impact lots of searches it is going to change the display of some.

Will Extended Snippets Mix With Adwords?

I haven’t found any search that uses extended snippets on competitive Adwords SERPs. But if the extended snippets are used alongside masthead Adwords blocks we could easily end up with just one or maybe two organic listings above the fold. I’m doubting we’ll see this, but given that I recently saw a SERP screenshot with 8 paid listings and only 3 organic listings above the fold. That was based on 2 line snippets. 4 line snippets for a similar SERP could reduce that to 2 organic listings to 8 paid ads. Horrible thought for me personally…

End Of Meta Descriptions?

Well obviously the META Description will still be very important, but from what I can see the extended snippets come from body content. Google has been using body content where it makes better sense for a long time. But you could still use well crafted META Descriptions to improve the chances they’d be used as snippets for you key search terms. That’s now a little more difficult to control. At least for the longer tail of search…

Definitely worth keeping an eye on anyway.