26 November 2009 | Author: R. Falconer SEO Consultant

Google Launches Rich Snippets in the UK

Google launched Rich Snippets on its UK search results today.

In May, Google launched Rich Snippets. So far only been available on Google.com and on certain very limited UK results (Facebook and LinkedIn profile results) but they have been spotted today on Google.co.uk in the links to sites such as Yelp.com and UrbanSpoon.

Google uses information contained in HTML with Microformats or RDFa to produce these Rich Snippets which provide the end user with additional information such as ratings and price ranges. Although there is no data publicly available, bigmouthmedia expects that results that have Rich Snippets will see a higher click through rate on their search results.

Google has been encouraging webmasters to mark up their HTML for Rich Snippets for some time and more recently released a tool to allow sites to test their coding.

Today a thread on Webmaster World noted that Rich Snippets were being rolled out to smaller sites in the US, where the initial trial was also confined to the likes of Yelp and UrbanSpoon.