One of the announcements at Searchology yesterday was a new enhancement called Rich Snippets, in which Google is using structured data embedded in web pages (microformats and RDFa) to give users “convenient summary information about their search results at a glance.”
Initially Google is supporting data on reviews and people. Reviews in particular offer a good opportunity for publishers as many content sites produce multiple types of reviews on a regular basis. Through Rich Snippets you can draw greater attention to your listings in the search results, which helps to increase clickthroughs to your content.
Here’s an example Rich Snippet from a Yelp listing for restaurant in New York that I like:
To take advantage of this opportunity you need to add microformat or RDFa markup to the source code of your review pages, which is pretty straightforward. You can follow Google’s guidelines for marking up structured data to learn how to do it, including the specific properties for reviews.
It’s important to note that marking up your pages doesn’t guarantee that your listings will get Rich Snippets, as Google says they will be rolling them out gradually. But now is a good time to begin experimenting with it.
For more information check out:
- Introducing Rich Snippets
- Google Search Now Supports Microformats and Adds “Rich Snippets” to Search Results
UPDATE:
Since the initial introduction Google has added Rich Snippets support for video and events.
Related posts:
- Yahoo Adds Enhanced News Results to SearchMonkey
- Does Social Media Increase a Journalist’s Value?
- Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?
- Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?
- Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?
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