This week, Google announced two minor updates on their algorithm. These had something to do with the summary of information about the website that surfaced in the search results, otherwise known as “Rich Snippets”. This aims to provide every user around the world the most relevant results in a shortest amount of time.

I. Global Implementation of Product Rich Snippets
As per Google, Product Rich Snippets has now been rolled out globally. Users can now see the preview information available on the websites such as the sample products or services offered by the search result’s site page regardless of where they coming from. Below is the sample Rich Snippets, services offered by our very own Smart Traffic.

Product Rich Snippets are designed to give users the idea of what’s on the website and why it is relevant to their query. Thus, having it visible to users worldwide is quite an achievement for Google.

II. Rich Snippets Testing Tool Now Support HTML input

In order for Google to display these Rich Snippets, markup formats (microformats and RDFa) in the source codes are required. And so to give the site owners and web developers the ability to check their source codes if it will actually work on their websites before having it published on the web page, Rich Snippets Testing Tool has been introduced.

But since the tool has limited capabilities (HTML codes are not accepted) many were not delighted. A lot of concerns have arisen and so Google updated the tool which now supports HTML codes in order for webmasters, site owners and SEOs to enjoy its full benefits.

Recently Google published their highlights of implemented updates from the month of March. Quite a few of these changes where focused on image optimisation. Let’s take a quick recap on what these significant updates are and pick some tips on how to comply with the modified algorithms for image search relevance.

More relevant image search results. [launch codename "Lice"] This change tunes signals we use related to landing page quality for images. This makes it more likely that you’ll find highly relevant images, even if those images are on pages that are lower quality.

Reasons of Optimising Images for Google Image Search

Visibility – search engine crawlers are like blind men, it can’t read images. The best way to make the images visible to bots is through the use of “Alt” attribute and “Title”. Use these attributes to provide descriptive text for the image. Thus, using a human-readable caption (surrounding text) or relevant information around the image is strongly advisable.

Size Matters –generally speaking, an image is the most eye catching element of a web page. It jumps right out at users before they actually read the whole content or search result. Hence high resolution photos and graphics are recommended. Remember that, while low quality images decrease load time, this will detract from the required visual effect.

However, high quality images do look great but may increase latency. So, for large images we suggest placing a small thumbnail image next to the description, and then link it to a high quality image. Images should be optimally compressed. Take note that properly optimised images will decrease the page load time.

More image optimisation related topics that are worth looking into:

Simplification to Images Universal codebase. [launch codename "Galactic Center"] We’ve made some improvements to simplify our codebase for Images Universal and to better utilize improvements in our general web ranking to also provide better image results.

Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.

Simplification to Images Universal codebase. [launch codename "Galactic Center"] We’ve made some improvements to simplify our codebase for Images Universal and to better utilize improvements in our general web ranking to also provide better image results.