Rich Snippets: Who is He?
Last year Google introduced Rich Snippets to their search results (we even blogged about it here). Originally, there were options to enhance results with reviews and information about people. They have since added support for videos and most recently, events.
In light of Google’s increasing focus on Rich Snippets, I thought I’d revisit the topic.
Why are Rich Snippets used and what can they do?
When Google is crawling the web and comes to indexing a page, it can’t tell the difference between, for instance, someone’s name and just a standard bit of HTML.
In other words, it can’t understand context.
So, on a search for ‘Brazil’, Google can’t completely tell the difference between Brazil (the place) and Brazil (the kaleidoscopic Terry Gilliam film). With the ‘rich snippet’ tags that Google supports, webmasters can tag pages with this contextual information.
This cleverness is achieved through RDFa tags and microformats, which are little-bits-of-simple-code that tell Google about the context of the words.
Using these tags tells Google that sections of your site have context to one of the pre-defined ‘rich snippets’ (an event, place, person, or review). Which means that in the search results page, Google will know to show this sort of thing if required. As below.
Examples: Google and Bing
Let’s look at results for the same term on two different engines, Google and Bing.
If we do a search for our business and spiritual dictator leader, Roger Warner, on Bing, we get this for his LinkedIn profile:
If we do the same search on Google, this result pops-up:
Notice the difference? In the Google results we get tantalising little shards of information about who Roger is. That’s because LinkedIn now automatically adds rich snippet ‘hcard’ tags to profiles, so that Google can distinguish Roger’s name from any other bit of text
If we try another search for a restaurant in London, we get a similar results.
Here’s Bing:
And here’s Google:
If your site is the only one on a results page with this extra data, it instantly stands out and should encourage more click throughs than the others. A nice bit of white-hat SEO.
Rich snippets also offer a real opportunity to connect SEO and Social Media. Content that is produced or inspired through socially activity and presence, can then be used to add rich snippets to your page. This content can then encourage users to click-through to your page or content. A virtuous circle.
While, at the moment, these is no guarantee that Google will show your Rich Snippets on its results page – they are still selected through proprietary algorithms – it certainly can’t hurt to include the tags in your site code to be ready when Google roll this out across their results pages more widely.
If you’ve access, you can add and test rich snippets using Google Webmaster Tools’ new ‘Rich Snippet Testing Facility’
We’ll be adding some of our own shortly.
Yours,
Richard Snippets BSc
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