The Launch of Googles Rich Snipets for Organic Results

May 14, 2009 by Pablo Palatnik

Organic search keeps expanding its formats and looks. Who would’ve figured 2-3 years ago Universal search. I’d say within the past 2 years, we have seen a lot of activity in the engines in terms of souping up organic search to look a little more standard then the usual SERPs. We have even seen some design in the paid search ads.

Google has now launched, in its gradual process, ‘rich snipets’. What is rich snipets?

“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 — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. Now we’re beginning the process of opening up this successful experiment so that more websites can participate. As a webmaster, you can help by annotating your pages with structured data in a standard format.”

In the webmaster blog, they explain rich snipets:

Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it’s as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags. For example, here are a few relevant lines of the HTML from Yelp’s review page for “Drooling Dog BarBQ” before adding markup data:

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and now with microformats markup:

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or alternatively, use RDFa markup. Either format works:

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By incorporating standard annotations in your pages, you not only make your structured data available for Google’s search results, but also for any service or tool that supports the same standard. As structured data becomes more widespread on the web, we expect to find many new applications for it, and we’re excited about the possibilities.