Google first announced the incorporation of Rich Snippets over a month ago and they are slowly being rolled out in the USA via Google.com. Probably the best coverage at the time was by Tim O’Reilly who summed up the move as follows.
Rich snippets could be a turning point for the Semantic Web, since, for the first time, they create a powerful economic motivation for semantic markup. Google has told us that rich snippets significantly enhance click-through rates. That means that anyone who has been doing SEO is now going to have to add microformats and RDFa to their toolkit.
Actually I’ve been using them since they were introduced. As of now only certain, trusted, review sites have had them included in results, here are the results for ‘vado reviews’.
Vado Review Google.com
As you can see CNET has been granted rich snippets, showing 3 out of 5 star rating.
However, adding semantic, structured markup to your site will have a cost, so, while your at it why not get ready for what’s coming. Semantic structure such as star ratings is very simple to understand and the Microformat implementation gives you the following simple ways of structuring your page, as follows.
- hCalendar – hCalendar creator
- hCard – hCard creator
- rel-license
- rel-nofollow
- rel-tag
- VoteLinks
- XFN – XFN creator
- XMDP
- XOXO
But, don’t stop there because there are plenty of other formats in draft stage.
- adr
- geo
- hAtom
- hAudio
- hMedia
- hProduct
- hRecipe
- hResume
- hReview – hReview creator
- rel-directory
- rel-enclosure
- rel-home
- rel-payment
- robots exclusion
- xFolk
For now the roll out is slow, but if you have the opportunity to get ready then make sure you cover all that will suit your site.
