Yesterday Beanstalk Blogger, Ryan Morben introduced a list of 10 New Changes to the Google Algorithm. One of the new updates that he mentioned was the use of “Better Snippets.” I thought I would take this opportunity to elaborate on these further.
In September this year, Google introduced rich snippets to be used for reviews, events and music sites. This was an effort to help users determine if a particular website had the relevant information they were searching for. The snippets allow you to get information about the applications, reviews and pricing within the actual search results before you download the app.
These rich snippets are becoming increasingly important for not just sites offering mobile apps, but for all software applications available to be downloaded. These rich snippets are becoming increasingly critical for software developer sites, software publishers, download portals and review sites to standout from the rest of the SERPs.
This new rich snippets has two additional attributes that help to specify which countries are currently supporting the new app, and which ones are not. However at this time, there is no formal standardization for the format specifications on schema.org.
Sites that have utilized this new snippet, specifically those with large review sections, or downloadable content, show much larger images in the SERPs than the author rich snippets. These larger images inevitably lead to larger CTRs and ultimate help to increase conversions.
Google will also inevitably prefer those sites using rich snippets/microformats that have more complete and detailed meta data. For this reason, it is imperative to provide meaningful data in all the available attribute areas and not to only fill in the required ones. You should always test new rich snippets and apply to Google to clear the new extensions in the SERPs to help boost your CTRs.