As you know, all of us here at Upperdog pride ourselves on keeping our noses to the ground to sniff out the latest news in the digital world and, being the loyal servants that we are, we’ve got our paws on some information that should get your tails wagging.

Over the past few days Google has released a new feature; ‘in-depth articles’. They may sound harmless enough but we’ve got a feeling they’re going to have a big impact on SEO.

Google’s ‘in-depth articles’ is a new block that features on the first page, integrated within your search results. Apparently up to 10% of daily searches involve trying to learn more about a topic, so Google has introduced in-depth articles to try and provide users with more comprehensive, high-quality content.

While a few changes have been made recently, there are currently three article results being shown at a time, with each in-depth article featuring a title and a publisher (be it an individual or a domain name). When this feature was first released every article shown also featured an image, a title and a short description, but very recent updates now appear to only show this full snippet for the top article.  The first article also has the opportunity to add a publisher icon and an author as well as a publisher.

This added block does not count as an organic result but it will still have an enormous impact on the organic results being shown. This is because, as it stands, the articles are being shown not as an addition to the first page but rather instead of a tenth search result, meaning there are now only a possible nine spots on page one.

Unsurprisingly, there is a clear link between the in-depth articles being shown and the news results. For now, the new block doesn’t appear to be replacing the news results, but admittedly a large proportion of the media giants that currently dominate the news results are appearing to do so for the in-depth articles too. However, don’t let that dampen your spirits because Google is doing its best to assure us this isn’t the case; we can all get some of these new, delicious treats!

There is absolutely no evidence to show that these article spots are just for the news conglomerates and Google seems to be supporting this, having recently released a document with advice on how to get in on the action.

• Use Schema code
• Authorship markup
• Pagination and canonicalisation
• Logos
• Use “first click free” for paywall content

Admittedly we’re all a little bit nerdy here, so we got pretty excited reading up on Google’s new feature. This could change SEO as we know it, but if done correctly it can massively boost your business’ online presence. We’ve already got started on implementing a few of the steps above and are looking forward to seeing the results.

If you’re interested in finding out more about this news feel free to contact us, or read more about SEO services, including mobile SEO, local SEO and technical SEO.