32 replies to this topic

[DJKay]

Hi Gang,

I am working on building a case for implementing two rich snippet types: events and products for a few of my sites. I am also working on building a case for introducing rel=auth and rel=me on our content sites. I am wondering if any of you out there have implemented rich snippets yet and have any anecdotal data or experiential learning you would not mind sharing.

As always IT resources are at a premium and its tough to get developer time when we have so many sites in design or redesign at any given time. If you have any information, I would appreciate it.

Thanks, DJKay

[Mikl]

I did rich snippets for a recipe site. It was a lot of work for a dubious benefit. There were two reasons for that.

First, adding rich snippets to your pages doesn't necessarily mean Google will take any notice of them. In the case of recipe sites, Google said that they only accepted rich snippets if the site had a "social" content - specifically, where visitors can review a recipe (not merely comment on it but actually write a review of it). I had to put the site through a submission procedure to get past that hurdle, and that took a couple of months or so.

I'm not sure if the above is still true. I think Google said it was an interim measure earlier this year (not sure about that). Also, I don't know about what other search engines do in this respect.

The second issue is that I'm not convinced that users (that is, searchers) pay any attention to this. For me to have the benefit from having a rich snippet-enabled site, users would have to explicitly click on the "Recipes" link in the side bar after they have done the search. I wonder how many users do that - or even notice the link.

That might be different for events and products. I don't know. If you decide to do down this route, I would be interested to hear how you get on.

[DJKay]

Thanks for the information..I could see what you are saying for recipes. I will certainly come back and report on what happens and what I learned.

I have been doing a lot of research today. I am still looking for some sort of ecommerce case study where I can point to and say they got XX% increase in sales, etc. I know amazon is doing rich snippets for their products as I have cut and pasted a few into a samples doc. The ecommerce site that we have sells books, so if Amazon is doing it, it might be enough to convince the product director.

I appreciate it. DJKay

[chrishirst]

Write a good meta description content that contains the words and phrases that the document is targeting.

[DJKay]

Yes, chrishirt, absolutely.

[Jill]

I use rel author and rel me but haven't seen anything showing that they are even noticed.

[qwerty]

We're about to start experimenting with schema.org code, starting on one of our sites and then expanding to the rest. In fact, I was brought into the project about a week ago as the guy who'd work out which schema code to use and how to use it. Like I'm an expert in this stuff

There's a lot of information out there about the subject, but there doesn't appear to be an active community of people who are there to help you learn your way around. So far I've posted one question at the Webmaster Help forum and got a response, but not a very helpful one, I've posted a question in Google's schema.org discussion group which hasn't been approved for publishing yet, and yesterday I found a blog post from June recommending the creation of a particular schema (one which I need to use). I asked if they'd heard back from the powers that be and a few questions about details of what they'd built... no response yet.

As I understand it, schema.org is meant to be extensible -- if new code is widely used and uses the correct syntax, it will be recognized and used by the search engines. I figure we're enormous enough that if we do it right, it will all work out and the code we use will be added to the schema.org site.

[DJKay]

Jill, thanks...I heard the same types of comments in the conversations I had with people in the audience during the schema.org talk at SMX, so hard to know.

Qwerty, thanks for your thoughtful reply..Amazon is using rich snippets..I did find some data in a blog post from a study..but nothing about a case study that said they implemented it and it did XYZ. Here is the data I found:

"Highly-rated product will increase likelihood of purchasing for 55% of consumers. (eConsultancy, July 2010)"

"Products with syndicated reviews convert 26% higher. (Bazaarvoice Case Study, 2009)"

Both of these are in regards to rating products, not necessarily if there is immediate benefit from having the price right there. Sure, it depends on the product, market, offer, etc. It just seems like a way for the serps listing to 'stand' out in the results page and whether that has a positive effect on sales, can't be sure.

Any..thanks all..if there is anyone out there that has information or feedback, I appreciate it. DJKay

[qwerty]

From an SEO/marketing perspective, I'd say it's all about increasing clickthroughs from the SERP by making the result stand out. Whether that increases sales or not depends on what people find on the page itself, IMO. I've read a couple of articles that absolutely insisted that this is going to be a ranking signal, but of course there was no indication of what this certainty was based on.

[DJKay]

Qwerty, I am remembering something like that I read somewhere too.

Since you have lots of ecommerce sites, so I see from Google Merchant Center that you can specify product rich snippets through your google merchant center feed...http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1068046

But do you need to do the actual coding on the site as well so when it gets crawled, they pick it up there as well? I also seem to remember people saying that just cause you had it in your feed, it did not always show up in your listing in the SERPS...any thoughts on that?

DJKay

[qwerty]

I'm not dealing with ecommerce sites, so I have no idea.

We're trying to get rich snippets for things like articles, personal profiles, job listings, and company profiles.

[DJKay]

Alright...thanks, DJKay

[DJKay]

Wanted to report back, so far so good. The product team went for it. So I got some developer time. I will keep you posted. I have heard they take time to show up.

DJKay

[DJKay]

Alright, so we have updated the Google Merchant Center Feed for one of our ecommerce sites as per the requirements set out. http://googlemerchan...earch-feed.html Along with that, we added the fields in the feed required for rich product snippets. The data is good and I have sent an email to Google as they requested when this part is finished. http://www.google.co...e=rich_snippets

Now, updating the e-commerce platform itself when pages are generated on the fly but not necessarily through product search...I will keep posted, the developer is working on it.

DJKay

[qwerty]

Have you tried out the pages in the rich snippets testing tool?