Google's "Rich Snippets": The Future of Hostel (and Hotel) Reviews

[Hostels]

I posted about Google, RDFa, and microformats but it had some HTML and technical content in it that might have been uninteresting to most people. This post covers the practical side of what is happening.

The basic summary is that your hostels' ratings are going to eventually appear directly in the search results like this:
(Notice the number of reviews and rating listed directly in the search results.)



This new feature from Google is called "Rich Snippets":
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...-snippets.html

Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. We are currently supporting data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they'll get help distinguishing between people with the same name

Google is reading certain elements in webpages (microformats and RDFa, as explained in my last post about it) and displaying it directly in the search results.

Right now this is limited to certain sites like Yelp.com, but Google will expand it in the future.

More info here and here:
Hostels, RDFa, and Microformats

The semantic Web is arriving -- it's the future of SEO.