londrum - 7:38 pm on Sep 19, 2011 (gmt 0)

... given that talking to someone at Google is about as hard as talking to someone on the planet Pluto, i was surprised to get a proper email from an actual human being a few months ago (with his own personal google email address, not a department). he was basically saying that he noticed i had a few rich snippets on my site, and suggested ways to improve them, explaining how i can get the description in the SERPS to feature all of this rich-snippet info.

i duly did what he said (because they were good suggestions) and i'm still getting emails from him now - a few months later. He is pointing out individual pieces of mark-up from individual pages, and saying his engineers cant process them properly and they need me to make some adjustments.

obviously google must be doing this to bazillions of other sites too, asking them to perfect the rich-snippets so they can crawl them better. I am a big cynic when it comes to Google, so i know full well that they are not doing this for my benefit -- they want to combine all this free info and put it at the top of the SERPs, or onto their own Google-owned pages.

But I find it interesting that Google is going around looking for sites with rich snippets, in a detailed fashion, and asking the owners to adjust it so they can grab the info better.

incidentally... my SERPs position has plummeted for a few phrases that are related to the rich-snippets, and i'm half-convinced that its because they contain hidden text (which is fairly normal for rich snippets). has anyone else seen the same?