A WebmasterWorld has SEOs and Webmasters complaining that they are noticing their competitors beginning to fake the rich snippets by planting their own microformats into the source code of the page.
Faking rich snippets is fairly easy. All you need to do is add any of the available markup to the page and if Google accepts it, it shows up in the Google search results.
You can fake things such as reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events, music and much more. In fact, recently, Google has been showing and allowing more and more sites to display these rich snippets in the search results.
Is this an issue for you? One webmaster said:
I have lost count the different ways I have seen reviews being faked. Google does have some safeguards in place but if you are creative enough you can get around them.If you are not experienced I would beg you to think twice before playing around with this. Most inexperienced (and even some experienced) people end up causing themselves more harm then good when taking these shortcuts.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
