View Aggregated Rich Snippet Data in Google Webmaster Tools

[morestar]

Well this is good news for webmaster's and SEOs utilizing rich snippets - for themselves or their clients - Google is now showing what it finds in the form of structured data on your website.

The section where you can view your website's structured data according to Google's view is in the Optimization section, under Structured Data. I hope the following is laid out properly for you to see an example.

Type	Schema	Items	# Pages
BusinessEntity	purl.org	105	105
hreview	microformats.org	3	1
hreview-aggregate	microformats.org	1	1

You may not like or care about using rich snippets - this guy thinks you're behind if you're not.

Now all is fine and dandy but I'm not seeing any information here about my authorship. I've validated my Google+ page connecting it with my profile on my blog but the rich snippet data isn't showing in the information above. Maybe that's something we can look forward to.

How does this data help us? Well as an example, I have a client who, before I started working with him he was no where in the search results. So as a part of my strategy I compelled him to create a Google+ profile, among other social media sites, I connected his blog/website to Google+ as a contributor and added rich snippets to various places of his website - his videos, his blog posts and his author page - not to mention the OpenGraph tags I utilized. Now, a few months later, not only has his traffic increased but he's showing up all over the place for various searches - his website, his profile, his videos and his address information.

Now with this data at hand, we can show our clients exactly what they want to see - a recognition by Google that this information is useful and collected by them, not to mention the positive results and click-throughs we experience in the search results.

Either way, I like this news and if you do feel free to share your thoughts!

[Web Res]

Thanks Morestar, I've been watching your posts on Rich Snippets for a while now. I work with websites serving the accommodation industry. Because these are locality based businesses last year I started using rich snippets to clarify the business name, address, contact details and Geo Codes. My goal has always been to get the business well established in Maps and Google Places to be on the first page for motel in 'my town' type searches. What I guess I've been missing is a tag that says the business type.

Today, I've been looking at the schema.org page and see they have specific product categories for Organization> LocalBusiness > LodgingBusiness: BedAndBreakfast, Hostel, Hotel, Motel.

It would appear that if I add a tag that identifies the LocalBusiness type as a 'motel' for example, that would only strengthen how Google views the website and how it displays the website in search. For example, many motels have 'motor inn' as their self defined description, but that is not a common search term as most people search for motels.

Then, I could add page specific tags such as products and prices that might display in search results such as budget motel rooms with a low and high price? It appears that google likes the page to have unique tags vs a tag that is repeated across the website. Like if we wanted to have a mid-week special or package we could add special tags and perhaps that would show in the search result.

Has anyone experimented with snippets related to travel/accommodation? I see a lot of search results display with rich snippets, but they all seem to originate from major websites like TripAdvisor, Booking.com, etc. These are usually based on reviews. I would like to give the actual accommodation supplier a similar advantage. I would consider adding reviews, but my guess is they are given more weight when taken from a 3rd party website.

Thanks, Mark