Submitted by dave on Fri, 2009-05-15 09:36
On Tuesday, May 12, 2009 Google Announced Rich Snippets -- a new feature they will display in their search results. Google claims:
Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. We are currently supporting data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they'll get help distinguishing between people with the same name. It's a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable.
This is significant in that if you take advantage of it and add the necessary markup to your site, you probably stand a chance of having a competitive advantage in getting your site ranked higher in the results. Of course, Google is not promising that, but the bottom line is complying with what Google wants usually is the way to go to get ranked on Google.
Currently it only works for reviews and people, but this sort of data description and classification is the wave of the future Semantic Web.
Initially, Google's adoption of RDFa will disrupt the current approaches to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With Google entering the RDFa game, the words "semantic markup" will get redefined. Every webmaster wanting to improve click-through rates, reduce bounce rates, and improve conversation rates, can no longer ignore RDFa or Microformats. Structured data is the new SEO.
says Dries Buytaert in his blog post Structured data is the new search engine optimization.
Rich snippets are not without a lot of controversy. Webmasters point out they want readers to come to their sites to get the review information, and what if the review is a bad one? Adding markup to support rich snippets to their sites could be significant investment, and could result in the loss of actual on site page views. On the other hand, including it might mean better search rankings in Google search results.
What do you think?
Please comment and let us know!
Recent comments
3 weeks 5 days ago
6 weeks 2 days ago
6 weeks 4 days ago
6 weeks 6 days ago
16 weeks 2 days ago
16 weeks 3 days ago