Google Documents Read More Snippet Links Best Practices

Several months after Google launched the Read more links within the Google search results snippets, Google decided to post some best practices how Read more links work. These should help you encourage Google to show the read more links and thus help increase click-through rates from Google Search.

Google posted these best practices here on the read more deep links and it shows (1) an illustration of what they look like and (2) lists three best practices.

Best Practices

Google wrote, “To increase the likelihood that “read more” deep links appear for your site in Google Search, follow these best practices:”

• Make sure content is immediately visible on the page to a human (and not hidden behind an expandable section or tabbed interface, for example).
• Avoid using JavaScript to control the user’s scroll position on page load (for example, don’t force the user’s scroll position to the top of the page).
• If you make history API calls or window.location.hash modifications on page load, make sure you don’t remove the hash fragment from the URL, as this breaks deep linking behavior.

Examples

Here is Google’s illustration:

Here is what it looks like in today’s Google search results page:

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