Google just announced that they’ve made some “upgrades” to their results pages: “more and better search refinements” (those “related searches” terms at the bottom of the search results page) and “longer snippets.”
I see two interesting developments here.
1) It seems that Google just opened the door for SEOs to exploit “related searches” terms. On one hand, it’ll help users to find related items. But on the other hand, it might just be another avenue for SEOs to get their keywords in front of users’ eyes.
2) Longer snippets means more context on the SERPs. This could go one of two ways: more of your relevant, high-quality content gets displayed on SERPs, providing users more info about your site, OR it just provides more motivation for keyword-saturation in content to try to fill the now-longer snippet with bold terms.
Maybe I’m way off and nothing will change. Who knows? But I’m sure it will be interesting to see what happens.