Google Cracks Down on Rich Snippet Spam

[Laustin1878]

Stumbled upon this article today and thought it was worth sharing: Google Starts Penalizing Sites for Rich Snippet Spam - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

It speaks about Google penalizing websites who are spamming rich snippets. As someone still navigating the waters of rich snippets, I was hoping some dialog could be started to discuss this in further detail and if any penalties have been handed down, what was done to cause the penalty or what you think was done and how was it remedied?

I'm all about clipping the wings of spammers but this seems like another slippery Google slope.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Luke.

Here's a SELand article too:
Google?s Latest Manual Action Penalty: Spammy Structured Markup

 

[Laustin1878]

I've read a number of comments and again, I don't get how using rich snippets on a whole is not being considered spam? The end user cannot see it so does that make it spam by the standards being highlighted?? Wouldn't that make most code spam? I'm sure I'm missing something.

I still feel that Google is driving out the hard working, small to medium sized businesses who are trying to gain some ground on the bigger companies who wipe their a$$es with $20 bills and have huge marketing budgets. They took a step forward with AdWords years ago by adding Quality Score. It leveled the playing field some. Rich snippets seemed to allow a smaller company to gain some natural rankings.

This opens ones eyes a little wider and expands on the point that you cannot solely rely on Google money to drive your business. Diversifying your efforts both online and offline is extremely important. Just like G to tell you to use a certain technique to "help us" learn more about your business only to drop the hammer and pick sites off and penalize them.

/rant

 

[Linda Buquet]

Another good post from ahrefs:

Google Has Started Issuing Penalties For Rich Snippet Spam, How To Avoid These Penalties

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Thought this had to be coming at some point.

I've noticed my clients' sites no longer have their authorship picture pop up. I think it's because it's on our footer of every page because we authored each page individually. I've planning some experiments on that.

However, I've seen one of our competitors still be able to keep theirs. I'm researching that more.

Also, I've seen differences in browser as well. At some point our authorship quit showing up in Firefox but would still show up in Chrome. That is no longer the issue.

Very interesting changes happening.

 

[Jamie Steigerwald]

According to this article only posts that meet these 3 criteria should have authorship:

• The URL/page contains a single article (or subsequent versions of the article) or single piece of content, by the same author...
• The URL/page consists primarily of content written by the author.
• Showing a clear byline on the page, stating the author wrote the article and using the same name as used on their Google+ profile.

Google Plus Authorship: One Critical Thing You Need to Know - YouMoz - Moz

However each page can have Publisher markup that links to your Google+ Local page.

https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1713826?hl=en