Over the past few months, Google seems to have been very productive in testing visual improvements to their SERPs: underlined links, breadcrumbs, snippets...

The Google team is always at work, but the question is: how much can these visual changes really affect results? And how do they actually track the outcomes of their tests if they keep changing what they propose so often?

There are many different opinions on this topic, and I was discussing a particular aspect just last week with Everfluxx, commenting on his blog.

Everfluxx strongly believes that visual changes have an impact on the CTR, because a few pixels of extra space or a missing underline can make the difference when clicking. I, on the other hand, believe that Google's users are savvy enough to click on anything they can if a proposed result is interesting enough, and so the most important difference on the SERP is still driven by webmasters through the content and page titles they create.

Besides this, the latest changes Google is currently working on — the snippets — are very interesting. On its blog, the Google team points out how a good internal link (on-page) strategy plays a very important role in helping search engines collect information to build the snippet.

The post explains pretty well how to go about it, and I think it will be worth a read.