Rich Snippets for Ecommerce

Pete Prestipino
by Pete Prestipino 05 Nov, 2010
Rich Snippets for Ecommerce

Google announced on its Webmaster Central blog that they are now supporting rich snippets for ecommerce sites. 

Rich snippets provide the ability to display structured data from web pages. Google's new ecommerce format will enable merchatns to show price, availiablity, and product reviews on pages offerings products for sale. 

Merchants can show the information needed for product rich snippets by either providing a merchant center feed or add markup to their site. Since most ecommerce sites already provide Merchant Center feeds for use in Google Product Search, the majority of the neccessary work is already done. To make use of Merchant Center feeds for rich snippets, Google advises using the rel="canonical" link element on product pages. By doing so Google can match the URLs in your feed to the pages found by its crawler.

The feature is currently only available to merchants located in the US, but Google will be rolling it out in more markets soon. 

Pete Prestipino
Pete Prestipino
Digital marketing executive with proven experience in all aspects of search engine optimization (SEO), performance-based advertising, consumer-generated/social media, email marketing, lead generation, Web design, usability, and analytics. - 20-year Internet marketing veteran, currently serving as the Digital Marketing Campaign Manager at Antenna Group (formerly Chicago Digital). - Former Editor-In-Chief of Website Magazine, and a regular speaker on Web technology digital marketing strategy - Author of several books on digital marketing Including Web 360: The Fundamentals of Web Success; Affiliate 360: The Fundamentals of Performance Marketing; Domains 360: The Fundamentals of Buying & Selling Domain Names, and SEO 360: The Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization.