Now, let’s consider another post that covers Rich Snippets as well as something called “Answer Highlighting” which looks like this:

“Consider the example, [empire state height]. The first search result used to look like this:”

“With today’s improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:”

Let me start off by saying I’m not making a judgement here… I just want us to take a moment to consider what’s going on here. These improvements for the user can have a detrimental impact on your traffic numbers.

By offering more information to the searcher on the SERP itself, the developer is removing the need for the searcher to actually visit the website. In the above example, I no longer need to visit Wikipedia to see the height of the Empire State Building. As Google adopts more and more Microformat protocols, it seems logical that the number of visits siphoned off should increase.

What’s the motivation for developers to encourage proliferation of the protocols if your goal is to drive traffic to your website? Couldn’t this change your goals?

Let’s say you have a restaurant website with your phone number and address tagged with Microformats. Someone looking for your restaurant or a similar one, might find your Rich Snippet in the SERP and call your restaurant. Success right? Sounds like it. Now imagine how that looks to an Analyst when multiplied by 1000 times.  I’d see a steady decline in visits to the site from Google and need for a way to account for that.  The apparent success of the site would appear to be waning but the restaurant’s phone would still be ringing off the hook.

What’s next?

It’s not hard to imagine what else could be served up in a Rich Snippet. Why not figure out a way to display your actual lead or contact form right there? Imagine the havoc that would cause for conversion rates. If you think about it, it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility, right?

I think there’s opportunity for further discussion on the impact of Rich Snippets and Answer Highlighting on our analytics in the future. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Video source: How do you rate links from sites like Twitter and Facebook?
Original Article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/01/answering-your-december-grab-bag.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/amDG+(Official+Google+Webmaster+Central+Blog)

Points of interest:

1. Links aren’t any different if they come from .gov or .edu. “It’s not like a link from an .edu autmatically carries more weight.” (1:58)
2. Most links on Twitter are nofollow. (We knew this but it’s worth mentioning again.)

I noticed that he didn’t mention links from Facebook Fan Pages, but he makes it pretty clear that all links are treated equally from the outset, but then Page Rank is applied to determine the linking site’s “reputation.” Keep this bit in mind people. It’s not always the number of links you have, it’s the quality of those links. You dig?

(for the experts out there… you may already know all this. however, this is core information that bears repeating for others out there who are just getting their feet wet. thank you for your understanding.)

Basically, all the search engines will let you suggest the preferred URL you’d like them to focus all the SEO juice on:

To use Google’s example, all you put in the head tag is something like this:

link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish”

That’s all there is to it, folks.

Here are the links to the new canonical goodness!

Google Webmaster Blog posting

Search Engine Land posting

For once, the search engines unite to make and SEO’s life a little easier.

WOO HOO!!!

Turns out that Google has tried to follow a URL it found in a JavaScript function. The problem is that this URL is only the beginning of an address that was to be constructed using other variables from the JavaScript function. Google obviously can’t run the function and put the whole thing together. It just found an “http://www.blahblahblah.com/and-so-on” and tried to go there.

What I find most interesting about this are the ramifications. Can you exploit this as an inbound link to another page? Does this pass page rank goodness? Would Google try to follow a URL in a JavaScript comment?

Interesting indeed.

Check it out!

“The Google PageRank Algorithm”

It pretty interesting since he also includes a PageRank Calculator.

Check it out folks!

When I was logged in to my Google account in Chrome, my article was #1. When I was not logged in and using Firefox, I was #8.

Just another example of how using SERP ranking as a success metric is becoming more and more wishy-washy.