As some of you might have noticed, back in May, Google released what they call “rich snippets” which essentially aims to “highlight structured data embedded in web pages” or, in other words, provide a more detailed meta description within their search results. These rich snippets aimed to provide things like product or service ratings and they released a set of mark-up formats to ensure webmasters could highlight the data they wanted to use.

This has since been extended to include local search information through the greater integration of HTML formats in web design like hCard to gain information about businesses services and indeed their physical address.

Whilst this is certainly a good step towards greater control of how your site is displayed in the serps, we’ve seen two rather interesting examples of rich snippets in action and it has to be said they haven’t yielded much of an improvement.

The first major change we noticed was when Google suddenly began using DMOZ listing data to provide title and meta descriptions on a couple of our client’s websites. Whilst this in itself is nothing new and was easily fixed with the right meta tags, it does seem strange that Google would decide to implement these now.  As rich snippets go it’s  a bit of a cop out.

The second example of Google going one step further occurred on our Motionlab web design site and was discovered when  I was surprised to see we had some Google traffic for the phrase “Malawi Marketing agencies” whilst looking through the Analytics data.

A quick look at the results revealed that Google had taken a rather liberal editorial attitude to our sites snippet as seen here:

After the initial amusement had worn off, it became clear that Google was combining our introductory blurb with a blog article snippet about one of our client’s conservation work in Malawi.

Whilst we appreciate the number 2 spot, it’s not really deserved and just goes to highlight how Google still has some way to go in refining this aspect of its search results.