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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.
Comments:
phpguy
12/22/2011 01:56 pm
All shortcuts end up causing problems in the long run. Google has a gaggle of brillant engineers working on these problems. They figure it out sooner or later.
zigojacko
12/22/2011 02:16 pm
Hadn't considered this approach previously but come to think of it, would be relatively easy to implement. I'm not talking faking anything here, but just getting the damn markup to appear in the SERP's period would be great to see. Until Google pull their finger out and get the markup working for all sites, I may look into adding some rich snippet markup manually. Heh
eCommerce
12/26/2011 06:48 am
This could be harmful to those who really provides the better services that their result goes behind the fake results.
Niall
12/28/2011 01:48 am
See faked reviews in the SERPs (Video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcDiUQRJdQA
SEO Vietnam
12/29/2011 03:18 pm
Hi, yes this is a problem as our clients and us will implement the rich snippets according to guidelines and will follow the rules. This of course is not what people faking snippets will be doing in the meanwhile.
Hgyuftdjf
01/24/2012 09:17 pm
realy this freaking retarded