Influencing Google Instant Preview

[CleverPhD]

Hello there!

I have been looking at how our articles are shown in Google Instant Previews.  While the description in the SERPs picks up the first paragraph from the article from the main table/div body, the Instant Preview highlights a text ad in the top right of the side column.

According to Google

https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-instant-previews

Q: How can I influence the text highlighted in the preview image?
A: The highlighted text is automatically chosen based on the user's search query. Only text that is visible on the page can be selected for highlighting.

Google is highlighting the same block of text from an ad space over and over again. "Download our Free Guide ...." vs the first paragraph in the article.

Any ideas folks?

[CleverPhD]

Thanks - I think I actually just answered my own question.

I was initially doing queries on on the URL as I wanted to see if the page was in the index to start with.  The words that were being highlighted in the text ad on the right, much of it was related to the words in the URL.

I went and searched on some keywords that we rank well on.  When I did this, other parts of the page were highlighted in the preview snippet.  I found some cases where the title was highlighted and others where text from the paragraph was highlighted on the page.

So, it looks like Google is taking whatever keyword query you are entering and then when you look at the preview for the page, it decides what text on the page to highlight.

If you want to see this in action here is what I did.  Take a page that ranks well for a key phrase.  Search the URL and then look at what text Google highlights.  It is probably some text that is in your URL.   When for that same page, search on the key phrase that you rank well for.  It will highlight a different section.   You would optimally want a page that ranks for keywords that are not in your domain name etc.

My initial concern was that Google was not doing a good job of highlighting the right part of the page.  Looks like they actually do decent work on this.

That said, thanks for the tip for checking the CSS layout.  I can see where we need to move some things around - thanks Irving!

[irvingw]

Please share your site for more analysis. Use a spider simulator to see how robots read your pages (one tool is here: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php/) , it's possible you may need to configure your CSS to make sure your article text is seen before your ad text.