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Google's John Mueller confirmed yesterday in a Google Hangout on Google+ that Google took action on major travel sites for showing product pricing rich snippets for airline prices. John said that these sites were using the product rich snippets for multiple products on the same page, as opposed to its intended use of one price per page.
The question came in at around the 47 second mark where John responded about why rich snippets for pricing travel sites were removed in the past week or so. John said:
I double checked about this just before the hangout actually. We didn’t actually change anything. What we did notice was a bunch of sites were using this as a way to kind of markup a variety of products instead of just one product. So we hope that the price markup on a page is specific to one product and you are talking about a page like flights to berlin, then that is like tons of different products essentially. Like different flights from different locations going to Berlin, so it is very hard to say well, it makes sense to mark that up with price rich snippets to show that in the search results because it is essentially all different kinds of products on the same page.So that is kind of what the team took action on there. We noticed that these pages were making up multiple different types of products in a way that you would for one product.
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at Google+.
