'Net Features : microformats

Google Goes International with Rich Snippets

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:47:00 GMT

Google announced the international availability of rich snippets on the Webmaster Central Blog this week. For those unfamiliar with rich snippets, they enable you to include additional data form your site in search results. That got your attention, didn’t it?

Documentation is now published on how to mark up sites correctly in several languages include simplied and traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Polish, and many others (including English).

Different types of rich snippets are currently supported including profiles of people, reviews, videos, events, and recipes. Google has provided a very handy testing tool which lets you validate your markup to make sure results are shown the way you want them.

Before you rush off and retool your site to include rich snippets, know that Google will be taking a “gradual approach” to surface the data – meaning there is no guarantee that the rich snippets you include will be shown on the SERP’s.

More Major Google Changes; Search Options Surface

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:29:00 GMT

Very rarely are there seismic shifts in the search landscape. For the past several years, search engines have only teased us with universal/blended search and dangled in front of us the promise that open standards (RDFa and microformats) would bring a new era of search. This morning was the first true sign that universal or blended search is real and that adding another layer of data will indeed result in a better experience for everyone - consumers and Web professionals.

Announced at its Searchology event, Google is showing the Web that it can not only straight index and rank Web pages, it can also categorize and extract information and present that data in some truly fascinating ways. Take that Wolfram-Alpha. First, the "Show Options" feature (which enables users to modify the presentation of organic/natural results) is going to level the playing field for Web professionals.

Say a user wants to search for a Star Trek movie review.

The "Show Options" feature opens a new sidebar on the SERPs (see below) that gives users the ability to restrict search results to video, forums, reviews or recent pages. What Google has done is to let users obtain results from various types of content already indexed by Google and modify (through restrictions) what content is presented.

Perhaps the most important, and the feature that supports what was mentioned yesterday on Website Magazine (in Mike Phillips' post on User Reviews Invading Google SERPs), is the ability to restrict results to reviews only. Using what seems to be sentiment analysis, Google is allowing users to see a snippet of exactly what the review's author has to say about the query being searched for. How do they do that? Keep reading...

A few other features include the presence of an extended list of related searches with the Wonder Wheel (a visualization feature that lets users improve their query by trying different suggestions successively - see below) and a timeline (users can explore how search topics change over time, as the 'timeline options' groups results by dates referred to on the actual pages - drilling down the results to a year or a month, for example).

Wonder Wheel:

Timeline:

So how does this affect Web professionals whose traffic relies on SEO?
My assumption is that it will matter quite a bit, but in a good way. Below are a few techniques (which hopefully will come as no surprise) that you should adopt if you have not already.

Produce content on a regular basis (daily if necessary) to provide exposure when consumers leverage time restrictions on search results (take that Twitter!)
Look closer at long-tail keywords (both for SEO and SEM optimization) through both related searches feature and the Wonder Wheel
Consider adding video to your marketing mix, as well as increasing participation in forums
Focus on managing your brand at review sites (identify those sites by using the new features)
Develop (or rework) existing pages with rich snippets (see below as this is very important)

Underlying many of the new features is Google's new focus on and support of microformats to create "rich snippets" which use meta data from Web pages (such as hCard, hCalendar) to display additional details (both content and meaning) about pages in the results. This highly structured data - which is embedded in Web pages - is really only open to a few larger portals like Yelp and LinkedIn now, but Google will be indexing this data from more sites over time. Google doesn’t guarantee that the presence of this metadata will result in rich snippets, but you can request consideration via a form. If Google finds this metadata during regular crawls, it may use it in rich snippets; the form isn’t a prerequisite, but may get the content indexed more quickly.

This means that you should be taking steps to display rich snippets by including markup formats like microformats and RDFa, and do that as soon as possible. By creating standard annotations, you make structured data available for Google and any service or tool that supports the same standard (like Yahoo! Search Monkey). The data that you will ultimately be encoding within a microformat structure might include the writer of the review, the date the review was written, the rating, or for items with multiple reviews, the number of reviews and average rating. For more information on Microformats, visit Microformats.org or see Google's documentation about marking up structured data.

While it's up in the air whether or not consumers will actually leverage this function with any regularity, it should be noted that, at any time, Google could move from presenting this information upon request to presenting it by default. Should that happen, you'll be prepared by taking the important steps outlined above.

Microformats - Should You Care? Yes...

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:25:00 GMT

Yahoo recently announced that it will begin formally supporting microformats and other semantic Web standards. Site owners can markup pages with microformats like hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom and XFN to the HTML code on a page, or create structured feeds using RDF (resource definition framework).

By implementing these open standards, site owners can classify certain elements on the page as contact information, events, reviews, episodic content, etc. Yahoo can take the structured content and more easily incorporate it into their index and that's just what they are going to do.

By indexing microformats, Yahoo! is giving developers and web site owners a big incentive to start using them. According to the post: "The data is already there, we just need to give people a reason to identify it. Content owners want to expose their structured data, but so far there's been no killer consumer application giving them a reason to do it. Search can be that killer app," said Amit Kumar, director of product management for Yahoo Search.

Many web professionals unfortunately fail to understand how to use these markup formats on their own sites (and how useful they can be - perhaps in securing better rankings at Yahoo!) regardless of whether the data is there or not - Yahoo is trying to change that. All in all, it's actually pretty easy to implement microformats if you've already got the data in a static format or are running applications which can be retro-fitted with this important semantic data.

Create A few Microformats For Your Website:

People and Organizations: hCard Creator.
Calendars and Events: hCalendar creator
Opinions, Ratings, Reviews: hReview Creator

Related Posts from Website Magazine:

Microformats for SEO
POSH: Plain Old Semantic HTML