How Rich Snippets Can Benefit Your Review Site

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Google recently announced a new code structure called Rich Snippets that will allow webmasters another opportunity to influence how the snippet in Google searches will appear. Already, you have some good options and Google has done a good job of making its snippets helpful to searchers and webmasters alike. I think Rich Snippets has a lot of potential to put more control in webmasters’ hands without taking away what Google has done to make its snippets helpful.

If you’re new to microformats or have no idea what they are, it’s real easy to brush. Microformats are simply a form of code used in addition to html to give explicit instructions to web applications to make certain parts of web pages more readable to them. Rich snippets from Google is based on microformats and is fairly easy to implement.

But just because you use it doesn’t mean that your snippets will automatically appear as Rich Snippets. Nevertheless, it’s a good opportunity, not just for review sites for any website that contains data such as calendars, directories, and other useful information that can be (and probably ought to be) semantic in nature. You can learn more about Rich Snippets from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.