Part of the Google Searchology event announcements from yesterday, Google announced a new way to enhance the search results. This way is called rich snippets and it gives webmasters a way to communicate richer data to Google, so they can display a richer search for the searcher. Yahoo has been doing this with Search Monkey for a months now, on some level. But Google is Google and this is much bigger.
Google will look for markups in your HTML in the format of either microformats and RDFa and use those markups to determine more structured data about that page's content. There is a lot of technical detail available at Google and it can be used on content for reviews, people, products and businesses and organizations.
There are some pros and cons to this feature on the SEO front and searcher front. Pros are that you can add more flavor to your listing and get more visibility. Cons include that richer data might mean less clicks or that competitors can more easily scrape your content. The lists goes on and you can read the pros and cons discussion at WebmasterWorld. That being said, I think I will personally use this new rich snippet feature on this site eventually and for clients as well. Will you?
Take our poll on if you will use this new feature:
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.
