Preview Rich Snippets using your Google Webmaster Account

With Google continually making changes to its SERP’s, we SEOs are always interested in what those changes are and how we can influence them. We look for tools and information to support us through these exciting periods of change.  Sites such as Search Engine Land and SEOmoz are obvious vaults of information that we should all be unlocking. However, it’s always a massive bonus for us all when Google itself helps us out.

Google Rich Snippets, what are they?

Google describes Rich Snippets as a way to “give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance.” Much like the way that webmasters can use the Meta Descriptions tag that describe the page, webmasters can provide data in a structured manner by using microformats or RDFa to mark up their web pages.

It is important to note that Microformats corrects the examples that Google have provided on how to correctly mark-up data. I would, however, advise looking at Knol, which has some great examples and FAQ’s, and Google’s supporting documentation.

Now you can preview Google Rich Snippets

Google have now rolled out a Rich Snippets Testing Tool which allows you to input a URL of your own and get a preview of how it would look in a SERP.

You’ll notice that Google provide example websites that are already structuring their data. I’m going to use Yelp UK to show an example of how the preview tool works.

The other important part of the preview tool is the way it shows the mark up language and the data like so:

Why is it useful to implement Google Rich Snippets?

Naturally, anything that features within your Google listing will affect your click through rate, such as the way you change your Page Titles and your Meta Descriptions.  The real question we need to ask is ‘will it affect it positively?’

Google have said in a post titled “Enabling Rich Snippets in Custom Search” that their “experiments on Google have shown that people find this additional data valuable – if they see useful and relevant information from a webpage, they are more likely to click through to it.”

I’m sure Google would not want to harm its user experience and a careful rollout plan is in place as described by Matt Cutts:

But what do you think about Google’s Rich Snippets? Have you already implemented Microformats and RDFa? Let us know your thoughts and have a go on the Rich Snippets Testing Tool.