Gary Eckstein

Rich Snippets (the term Google uses for Microformats, RDFa and Microdata) is used by many larger organizations. Rich Snippets is essentially data that conforms to a specific standard so that machines may understand the data. For example, say that I want to write a review, then I may use the hreview Microformat standard to review a product or service. Search Engines are then able to understand that it is a review, what rating I give to the product or service and even the exact product or service I am reviewing. The Search Engine will then be able to amalgamate the various ratings from all over the Web for that specific product or service.

Online reviews are becoming a major reason for a person buying (or not buying) a product or service as people come to trust individual reviews and ratings more than adverts. It makes sense then for Website owners to embrace common standards such as Rich Snippets and for the Search Engines to use this data in the SERPs.

Until recently however, there was no standard for describing reviews in a machine readable way. Resnick, Zeckenhauser, Fiedman and Kuwabara described in their paper ‘Reputation Systems: Facilitating Trust in Internet Transactions’ that an obstacle to distributed feedback systems is the lack of portability between systems of reviews. The hreview Microformat addresses this shortfall by providing portability of reviews.

With Google announcing that it has started to index and display Microformats, RDFa and Microdata in SERPs it makes sense, from an SEO perspective, to format reviews and contact information according to Microformats, RDFa or Microdata standards. Many larger organizations are already displaying relevant data formatted per the necessary standards such as Amazon.com reviews being in the hreview format. There are also companies providing hreview format services for organizations such as LouderVoice.

A cool free Tool that Google provides assists with visualising how Microformats, RDFa or Microdata rich Webpages may look in the Google SERPs.

A review of the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool is provided below in Microformats hreview format (click for how the Rich Snippets Testing Tools views the review below):

Jul 23, 2010 by Gary

Google provides many helpful free tools for Webmasters. These tools typically assist in making Website content more Search Engine Friendly. One of the lesser known Tools provided in Webmaster Tools by Google is the beta version of the ‘Rich Snippets Testing Tool’. This Tool will become ever more relevant to Webmasters and SEO experts as Rich Snippets (Microformats, RDFa and Microdata) is indexed and displayed further by Google in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If your Webpage has Rich Snippet data then all one needs do is put the URL into the Tool and click ‘Preview’. How the Microformats, RDFa or Microdata information will then be displayed in the SERPs is shown. Unfortunately however the types of Rich Snippets identified and displayed by the Tool is still limited. For example, hreview meta will display however hcard data won’t. From a Search Engine Optimization perspective, Microformats, RDFa and Microdata data will increasingly become more important. The Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool will become more important as more Rich Snippet data is shown in the SERPs.

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A new Telstra Blog has gone live over the past few days. The new Blog called ‘Telstra Exchange’ is a replacement for ‘Now We are Talking’. From a technological perspective it’s great that Telstra is again using WordPress as the Content Management System (CMS).

Some of the WordPress Plugins being used are;

• Extended Profile: From WordPress.org: This plugin extends the standard WordPress profile to include additional attributes such as photo, organization, address, phone number, and others. A user’s entire profile can then be output as an hCard on any page using the profile shortcode, or with the provided widget.
• Contact Form 7:  From the developer: ‘If you value simplicity and flexibility, Contact Form 7 is a great choice. It allows you to flexibly design the form and mail. You can manage multiple contact forms as well. n addition, it supports many features including AJAX submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, file uploading, etc.’. P.S. I use Contact Form 7 on numerous Blogs and love it!
• WP Text Sizer: From the developer: Provide visitors to your site the the option of increasing or decreasing the size of text onclick of image or text links using JavaScript. This code provides that option yet allows you, the page designer, to control which portions of your layout can have text size adjusted and how much.
• WP-reCAPTCHA: From the developer: reCAPTCHA is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University which uses CAPTCHAs in a genius way. Instead of randomly generating useless characters which users grow tired of continuously typing in, risking the possibility that spammers will eventually write sophisticated spam bots which use OCR libraries to read the characters, reCAPTCHA uses a different approach. They effectively kill two birds with one stone.

Great move by Telstra in using WordPress!

Disclaimer: Please note that at publication date of this post I am providing ITIL Process Mapping services for Telstra. I do not represent Telstra in any information on this website. The views expressed in this post are mine only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Telstra

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Reading through the Nielsen article ‘Organized Chaos: Global Data Harmonization’ which describes, in the context of categorization, the challenges faced by a single product being used for different purposes, it became very clear how awesome Internet tagging is. Tagging is effectively the ability to designate a single item to multiple categories.

The Nielsen article shows the image below as an example of the challenges of categorisation of a product used for multiple purposes.

On the Internet we are very fortunate that with tagging we may ‘assign’ as many relevant ‘categories’ to a single item as required. This eliminates the need for a single category being assigned. Of course there is still the ‘problem’ with tagging where two identical items may be described with different tags (and incorrect tags may be assigned). Tagging however is a significant step forward as opposed to single categorization.

Microformats / RDFa / Rich Snippets are beginning to be used by Search Engines to better identify similar or identical products. It is tackling this category constraint by allowing multiple categories. For example, a Canon EOS Rebel T1i is called a Canon EOS 500D in Europe. The hproduct identifier will therefore differ however brand, fn and category will enable Search Engines to better link the cameras as in fact being the same camera. The result is more accurate search results.

The Internet, with advances such as tagging, is certainly beginning to address the challenges faced through single categorization.

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I noticed recently that Microsoft Live does not display my website or page on Australia specific searches. My TLD (Top Level Domain) is a .com however I have made numerous efforts to tell the search engines that my site is primarily for the Australian audience.  Unfortunately Microsoft Live is the only one of the major search engines that doesn’t understand where my real target audience lies.

The whole aim of Search Engine Optimization is to get quality visits from organic search results. In essence this means appearing in a prominent position in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for the keywords and regions relevant to your page or website. Google make setting the ‘Geographic Target’ very simple through ‘Google Webmaster Tools’ and now both Yahoo and Google are using RDFa / Microformats / Rich Snippets data in a meaningful way which assists in determining the target region. Unfortunately Microsoft Live still doesn’t appear to be able to determine the target region well and there is no means of manually updating the error by Microsoft.

Here is what Microsoft have to say about how they determine the target region of a website:

‘If your website is located in a different market, your website might rank much lower in your target market’s search results than it does in your local market’s search results.

Live Search uses information such as the website’s IP address (A specific numeric address for a computer on a network, such as the Internet.) and the country or region code top-level domain to determine a website’s market and country or region. You can alter this information to reflect the market that you want to target.’

What Microsoft mean by ‘alter this information to reflect the market that you want to target’ is; get a host with an IP address in your target region and get a TLD for the target country. Let’s hope that Microsoft Kumo does a better job at the basics like understanding what region/s a website serves!

Here are a few tips to get your site as region specific as possible:

1. Host your website in the region you are serving e.g. if targeting the U.K. the get your website hosted in the U.K.
2. Include your target country in RDFa/Microsofmats/Rich Snippets information on your website.
3. Advise Google of your ‘Geographic Target’ through Google Webmaster Tools.
4. Get links / backlinks to your website from sites in your target country.
5. Include your URL in region / country specific directories e.g. Google Local and Yellow Pages.
6. Ensure that the language meta information of your website is set to the targeted region e.g. you should see lang=”en-AU” for Australia, lang=”en-UK” for the U.K., lang=”en-US” etc. A list of valid entries may be found from the ISO (if you are using WordPress then check out Installing WordPress in your language).

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Microsoft will soon be launching its next attempt in trying to capture a greater share of the search market. There has been a lot of news lately in relation to the various search engines; last week saw the launch of Wolfram Alpha, the week before was the news of Google starting to index ‘Rich Snippets’ (Microformats and RDFa data).

Microsoft has been testing Kumo Read the rest of this entry »

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