Google adds Read more links best practices

Back in December, Google began showing read more links on some of the search result snippets within Google Search. Today, Google published new documentation around best practices on how to show Read more links in the Google search results.

The best practices. The new documentation was posted over here in the snippets section and it lists three 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.

What it looks like. Google also posted an illustration of these links, here it is:

Here is an example of how they look:

Why we care. These read more links do add an additional eye-catching link to the search result snippets. Hopefully, this leads to encouraging more clicks to websites and no less.

More clicks to websites is a good thing, so make sure to review the best practices to encourage more clicks to your site.