Google has made a major change to the search results column. In a major redesign of the appearance of search results, Google has significantly increased the width of the main search results column, impacting everything Google shows in this column.
Google has increased the organic search results column from 500 pixels to 600 pixels. The amount of white space between the results and the right sidebar has decreased by 5 pixels, from 65 pixels to only 60.
Featured snippets, local packages, and AdWords are affected by this new change.
Here's a comparison:
And here it's a little easier to see the change in width:
What does this mean for organic results? Changing the width could actually move search results higher on the pages, if some of the multi-line listings end up needing one less line.
Many of the features in the main search results column are reduced in height, meaning that some of the organic results, depending on the particular search query, they could be pushed up the page. This is great news, especially for those who were disappointed when Google changed the search results to add 4 AdWords ads at the top of the results page.
This also means there is a new length for the title! So instead of trying to work within 55-60 characters maximum, you now have 70 characters before Google adds the ellipsis (…) Descriptions will increase to about 16-20 characters.
The featured snippets also increased, although it may not seem like it, it has changed. The height is significantly reduced. But the title increases. Snippet width is now 646 pixels wide (46 pixels wider than organic search results).
Local maps are also increased and they have the same dimensions as the snippets. Here is the comparison between the two versions.
The width in the right hand column, known as the Google Knowledge Panel, remains the same width and does not adjust at all.
AdWords is also showing ads more broadly in search results.
This seems to have been showing up in a lot of searches over the last few days, but it may have started a week ago. It is launching internationally as well, as we are seeing it on Google.co.in, Google.co.uk, Google.ca, Google.co.au and many others.
And it's appearing in several languages too. It is clear that it is not a 1% test, which is the usual percentage of search results that is done in a Google test.
It is showing in both session and incognito modes.
Jonathan Jones was the first to detect the column width change. I noticed that Google had changed the format of their ad types at the top of search results, which seems related.
Source: The SEM Post
