MMMmmm, Rich Chocolate Snippets
Yesterday at their annual Searchology conference Google announced an exciting new feature coming soon to search results. They are called Rich Snippets. I keep wanting to refer to them as rich chocolate snippets for some reason, perhaps my overexposure to a certain brand of vitamin enriched chocolate milk during my youth, but I digress. So what are they, and why do you care?
Rich Snippets are basically a collection of really helpful enhanced search results that will be integrated right into Google including reviews, customer quotes as well as personal information from online profiles on social networking sites. Google is rolling this out slowly, but it seems inevitable for it to become as integrated as universal search has over the past 2 years.
As a search marketer, my first reaction was, “Oh cool, everyone will want to click on sites with the golden stars.” I wanted to tell everyone with reviews integrated into their site to start modifying their sites to use micoformats and RDF (the data formats Rich Snippets rely on) to be ready for the coming revolution; however, it’s not quite that easy. Google will still algorithmically determine whether or not your listing contains those eye-catching review stars based on the query and your site’s relevance. You also have to consider the user experience of seeing a review before clicking through to a site. Will they still click through? And, what happens if your competition uses Rich Snippets and their reviews are a bit better than yours. Say goodbye to your traffic.
Wow, Rich Snippets could be a big deal!
If users can compare multiple websites based on human feedback at a glance, they have the power to drive businesses to offer improved quality and service. Oh, and if you’ve been putting off that modern, more social, web 2.0ish interactive site upgrade for years, maybe now you have another reason to consider developing it.
Tags: google, search results, searchology
