Google SERPS removes search filters

Dani 3 387 Views

Until not very long ago, the More dropdown menu on the Google search results pages offered the ability to filter the results by type: News, Discussions, Blogs, etc. There were quite a handful of choices and they've all existed for years and years.

It used to work great for me, but for the better part of 2013, I actually found it quite frustrating because whenever I was filtering site:daniweb.com results by Discussions, only news stories and code snippets would come up, and meanwhile all of the forum threads would show up when filtering by Blogs. In fact, I posted something a few months ago suggesting that the reason for our Google traffic decrease might be because Google thinks our forum threads are blogs, and is holding them up to the same editorial quality standard as blog entries as opposed to discussions. A few days ago, I finally had enough and tweeted my frustration to Matt Cutts from Google:

@mattcutts Confused: Our editorial articles and code snippets are classified as Discussions in SERPS and none of our forum discussions are?

Now, a week later, all the filter choices have miraculously disappeared. There's an article about this over at Search Engine Roundtable as well where they seem to suggest that the filter options are now search query-specific, but from everything I can see, the Blogs and Discussions filter choices no longer exist.

Conspiracy? :)

Dani AI

Generated

As described, Google quietly shrank the old "More" dropdown in late January 2014 and began showing only a small, query-dependent set of vertical filters instead of the long static list (so Discussion/Blog tabs can disappear even though that content still exists in results). Google framed it as making the top menu adapt to what it thinks is most useful for the query. (techcrunch.com)

Concrete ways to reproduce or work around this immediately: load the Discussions or Blogs vertical directly or force it with the URL modifier (for example, append &tbm=dsc to try to view Discussions or &tbm=blg for Blogs), or include the word "discussions" in the query. If those fail, build more-targeted queries using site- and path-based operators or inurl:/intitle: filters to surface forum threads. These URL/tbm workarounds and the "search-vertical landing pages" approach were what several SE blogs recommended when the change rolled out. (ghacks.net)

If forum pages are being treated like blogs (which can change how/when they appear in any vertical), focus on signals Google uses: canonicalization, clear URL structure, and explicit structured data. Forum sites should consider the DiscussionForumPosting or QAPage schema where appropriate so Google can better recognize thread pages, and then use Search Console to validate and monitor that markup. Use URL Inspection and the Performance report to see how Google indexes pages, which canonical it chose, and what queries bring traffic. Google documents these markup and inspection tools and their recommended workflows. (developers.google.com)

Practical routine: pick a few representative queries, compare results with and without &tbm=dsc/&tbm=blg, log which pages appear, then correlate that with Search Console impressions/clicks for those pages. Expect Google to keep experimenting — region and query both affect which filters show up — so treat this as a UI/experiment change rather than a site-specific penalty. (techcrunch.com)

Member Avatar for Ash_1
Ash_1 0 Newbie Poster

or quite some time I have noticed that the options differed based on the type of search. At the moment I can't reproduce that, whether I search for a news topic or a forum. There are small differences per country - the More dropdown in Australia has Maps, Books, Applications but in New Zealand you only get Books and Applications. In India you get Videos and Applications.

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