Rich snippets on language specific google sites
Roy Lachica
If I search for “tomato soup” on google.com I get nice structured
previews with images, rating etc in the search results listing.
I also get a menu item “Recipe” and filtering options such as
ingredients and cooking time.
If I do a search for Tomatensuppe (german text) on google.com I also
get some German rich snippets results.
When I do the same search on google.de I do not get any rich snippets
results. There is no Recipe/Rezept type search results in the left
menu.
The same goes for “crema di pomodoro” (Italian text) on google.com.
On google.com I get some Italian rich snippets results but none on
google.it
Looks like rich snippets are only enabled on google.com SERP’s.
Can anyone confirm this and if that’s the case when will it be
available on language specific google sites?
Best regards
Roy Lachica
Webnodes Semantic CMS
http://webnodes.com
Martin Hepp
The technique used by search engines is not as simple as "rich snippets on" vs. "rich snippets off".
All major engines have to use software components that assess the quality (e.g. is the price current?) and trustworthiness (e.g. is the data in line with the page content and is the page a relevant resource?) of the meta-data. They will only show a rich snippet / rich caption if a page passes this test.
Quite likely, but I have to speculate in here, such a component uses multiple signals from the page to decide upon whether to show a rich snippet / rich caption or not, same as the normal relevance ranking can consider more than 100 - 200 signals from a page (including speed, domain age, ...). So the general importance and ranking of your site domain may e.g. influence whether you see a rich snippet, but that is again not the whole storey:
At least the following four things must be in place for seeing a rich snippet / caption in a search engine:
1. There must be valid rich markup in the page (or the search engine has access to the data from a bilateral data exchange, as it happens with a few top sites).
2. The markup must have been there when the page was last crawled / indexed, i.e., the meta-data must be in the caches.
3. Rich Snippets must be turned on for the local version of the search engine you are using (note that search engines may run multiple versions of their user interface even in the same country, for testing or for deployment reasons.)
4. The software component indicated above must think that showing a rich snippet for your page is likely a good thing.
If you do not see a rich snippet, this can have a wealth of causes:
1. The meta-data markup is invalid or incomplete. (Solution: fix the markup)
2. The meta-data is not yet in the search engine's index. (Solution: 1. wait 2. implement sitemap.xml properly, especially with correct lastmod attributes.)
3. Rich Snippets are not yet available in the local version of the search engine (Solution: Wait and hope and pray)
4. The search engine is not convinced that your meta-data adds valuable information to Web users (Solution: 1. Re-use visible content for markup 2. Make sure your page is up to 2011 SEO standards in general, i.e. has a good basic ranking, fast page loading times, "clean" item page URIs, relevant, real external links, relevant keywords, ... - basic SEO stuff)
Note that the assessment mechanism and/or its calibration may be different for different countries, so while your page may pass the test for the US version of a search engine, it may not pass the test for the Italian version.
I also assume that the calibration of the "gatekeeper" component #4 will depend on the number of available training data, so the search engines can allow more rich snippets for a country / language / region / local version for which they already have a lot of pages with meta-data markup. So if you are among the first sites to use rich mark-up in your country, you may have to wait a little bit longer than in a country where rich mark-up is already widely used.
So from not seeing a Rich Snippet despite rich markup, you cannot easily derive that there are no rich snippets turned on for your country.
Hope that helps!
Martin
http://purl.org/goodrelations/
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martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
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Roy Lachica
helpful to understand more of the complexities behind this.
I hope Google themselves will become more available to answer things
like this themselves.
I don’t have a website that I want to get shown with rich snippets. I
am developing Schema.org support in a CMS system, so to know when rich
snippets will appear in my country is highly relevant.
After further investigation I found that rich snippets for “tomato
soup” are shown on some but not all local country Google sites. Rich
snippets for “tomato soup” are shown for Google.com, google.co.uk,
google.com.au and even Google.com.nz so we can conclude that rich
snippets are technically supported on local country Google sites.
For the moment I can only assume the reason for rich snippets not
showing up on some local country Google sites is that there simply is
not yet enough structured data in that country and/or language for
that type of content, as you pointed out as a probable cause.
Again thank you very much