Google has announced that in order to help mobile searchers understand your website better in mobile search results they’re changing the way they appear on the screen. The change involves updating the algorithms that display URLs in the search results, so that they show the real-world name of the site instead of the domain name.
The move is intended to better reflect the names of websites for mobile browsers.
As part of this launch, the URL structure of the sites will also change, and will be displayed in a breadcrumbs-like format. A breadcrumb trail is a set of links (breadcrumbs) that can help a user understand and navigate your site’s hierarchy. The new Google search result display will show the structure of your site in a breadcrumbs format to make it easier to determine the content of your site beyond the Landing page title and description.
This makes how you label the pages on your website much more important. Page names that reflect the content of your site and their relevance to your target market are likely to translate into more clicks through from search results, not only to your landing page but further into your site.
These changes will be rolling out gradually and affect only mobile results. Currently, the site name change affects US-only websites for now, but the new breadcrumbs are rolling out worldwide.
How to control the site name that appears in mobile search results
You can use structured data markup on your public website to indicate the preferred name you want Google to display in Search results. You can also provide more than one possible name for your site, and let Google Search algorithms choose between them.
Once Google has crawled and indexed the updated page, the search engine can use the provided name in Search results.
Site name requirements for structured data mark-up
To achieve this, the website names you supply in your markup should meet the following criteria:
Be reasonably similar to your domain name
Be a natural name used to refer to the site, such as “Google,” rather than “Google, Inc.”
Be unique to your site—not used by some other site
Not be a misleading description of your site
There are a series of requirements your webmaster will need to meet in order for Google to recognise your markup as a site name.
For more details and code examples, please see Google’s structured data documentation for providing site names and breadcrumbs.
Information sourced for this article comes from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
To find out more about this or to have your site name and other page titles updated to read better in mobile search results, contact Web Tonic for a quote.