Paul Gailey   Apr 24 2012   Flag

let's be clear, rich snippet abusers *are* getting their stars removed.

David Weichel   Apr 24 2012   Flag

Hey Paul, thanks for your comment. You're right in that Google is already regulating rich snippet spam to a certain extent. In fact, Google's revoked the rich snippets that were the focal point of this conversation on Cyrus Shepard's Google+ profile http://bit.ly/In4vMC. I didn't intend to come across as saying that Google isn't doing anything about this. Rather, they could/should have better systems in place for policing this. As this rich snippet spam becomes more common (as I'm sure it will) it's in Google's best interest to come with a better way to police this issue. Unfortunately, I think resisting spam in this case is going to result in Google being a lot less trusting of webmasters' semantic markup which is sad.

Paul Gailey   Apr 25 2012   Flag

I suspect until they can machine learn from the volume of manual violations reported plus any big money SERPs they police also, it's going to be a while till the stars get cleaned automatically if at all. Ideally author/identity verified reviews would help mattesr but the adoption is probably way off yet for that right now. IMO the industry cannot moan about snippet spam if it's not willing to take 5 seconds to report egregious examples. Do a non personalised search for "email marketing software" and tell me that is not 980 little luncheon meat stars staring right back at you.

Michael J. Kovis   Apr 24 2012   Flag

I think it is also important to remember that no matter what type of technique is used, there is always going to be a select group that abuses them.