Google Places Rich Snippets Finally Working?
I have been hearing reports from a variety of sources that over the past few days more rich snippets have started to show up in Google Places.
Using rich snippets on your site to get your content into Place Pages has been a hit-or-miss affair – mostly miss. At SMXWest, Google’s Carter Maslan told me that they had been working on improving the algorithm to better index and display rich snippets that they find on websites. Over the past few months Places observers have noticed a lot of wackiness in the display of data, rankings, etc. which implied that Google may have been testing a number of algo tweaks. Although we are in early days, it appears that this latest tweak may have been a significant one.
For example, I have been tracking the presence of DemandForce reviews in Places and since last week I have seen a noticeable increase in their content showing up in the “Reviews from around the web” section of Place Pages. It appears that DemandForce has some kind of feed relationship with Google because data from them has been showing up in the “Details” section for a while (I have some clients that have formal feed relationships with Google and this is where their content typically displays). Here’s a before/after shot of a Place Page with increased review snippets:
Before Rich Snippets
After Rich Snippets
At first I thought this was an anomaly because as you can see in the “After” image GOOG is displaying snippets from both DemandForce.com and DemandForced3.com. It appears that DemandForce is 302 redirecting DemandForce.com URLs to DemandForced3.com URLs, so my guess was that they were feeding the DF.com URLs to GOOG but GOOG was also finding the DF3 URLs and keeping both thanks to the 302s. (Tip to those with feed relationships with GOOG – do this and you may be able to get similar “double-dip” results – until GOOG fixes this of course).
I have also been seeing a big increase in rich snippets from other review sites like CustomerLobby.
Anyone else seeing this?
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