13 May 2009 | Author: R. Falconer SEO Consultant

Rich Snippets – Microformats take another step forward

Google has announced that "Rich Snippets" will be used within search results in future. Snippets are the bits of text that exist below your page title within search results. Google plans to take structured data from web pages to provide more useful information to users in the snippet.

Currently, snippets are taken from a number of places - most often the meta description or text from a page, occasionally from the Open Directory Project.

Google already presents certain information in a similar fashion for message board results. Often the number of posts, authors and date of most recent post are displayed directly in the search result. Last month, Google announced that it would expand snippets for longer search queries. Now it plans to take information from semantic markup to display in its results.

So far Google will display information about reviews and people but plans to provide other useful information in future. For products or services, the results will show an average rating out of five and advise the number of reviews made. Results given for queries about people/names (think social media results) will include information to help distinguish between people with the same name.

The information for rich snippets is being taken automatically from the source code of the page. The data will be taken from markup formats - microformats or RDFa, both of which are open formats.

In the case of reviews, the information will be found within the hReview microformat or v:Review RDFa. RDFa also has an additional "about" property which can be used to provide links to extra information pertaining to the v:Review. Google has encouraged the use of this, stating that the information may be utilised in future. This would suggest to any site deciding which format to use, that RDFa may be the best option from an SEO point of view.

Google has been testing results using this information and has concluded that users find it useful. Rich Snippets will therefore be opened up to more sites. However, simply adding the correct microformats or RDFa to pages will not automatically ensure that the information provided will be used in search results. In typical Google fashion, Rich Snippets will be rolled out gradually and will be presented based on algorithmic decisions.

Webmasters who would like to express an interest in being part of this "experiment" can contact Google via a contact page.

As yet we have not seen any live examples of Rich Snippets being used but fully expect that to change in the coming days.

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