How do I stop Google from poaching data for snippets?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I call it poaching because a)I don't know what it's called officially yet and b)it is a snippet that appears in search results as an extra.

An example would be your favorite football team. They have a website and of course all information can be found on that website. Obviously the official site deserves to be #1 too, but that's where the poaching comes in.

ABOVE the #1 result for your favorite football team is another entry, using the name of your football team as link, but the snippet is the hot topic of the moment depending on what's being searched for at the moment.

example:

[image] WEBMASTER WORLD WIDGETS
- Watch the Widgets play the Fidgets
- Next game is tonight at5:30pm PST
- link, link, link to other related stuff

There is an image next to the link making it stand out. The information provided means the visitor may not even click on the official site anymore since they just got what they wanted. While helpful it's undoubtedly robbing the official site of some traffic and traffic is money.

How do you block these "special" extra results from appearing above your site?

edit: since it's monday night football night try searching for "NFL" or for your favorite team, the extras will be shown above the official site along with extra data

[Robert Charlton]

The "extra" results are Universal results, or some variant thereof. We had a discussion in June 2010 regarding some results that sounded similar....

Interesting google SERPs for 'world cup'
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4149626.htm [webmasterworld.com]

In the thread, btw, I mentioned, regarding these results...

...concerns should be much more about data aggregation than about Truth compressed into a single sentence. There's a lot of data aggregated here.

It will be interesting to see how much Google gets into this kind of display. I anticipate more coming. From the user's point of view, I think this page is superb, and, in this case at least, I think there's a definite symbiosis between Google and the data creators.

In the above case, the data "creator" was the World Cup organization. As I remember, their site was well linked to.

With regard to the original question posted here, how official is the site and what kind of data is Google using? Are you the only source?

...since it's monday night football night try searching for "NFL" or for your favorite team, the extras will be shown above the official site along with extra data

It's a while before game time here... but searching for [NFL] brings many, many links for the official NFL site, slicing the data about a dozen different ways, followed by multiple recap and box score links for ESPN for recent games.

I'm not seeing any Universal results at all right now for this query, so maybe Google has backed away from their earlier approach of Universal extras in favor of large Sitelinks.

I don't know how NFL and ESPN are deciding who owns the box score data.

[Robert Charlton]

Top result in northern California, searching for [nfl], at c7:40pm PDT...

NFL games
www.nfl.com
In progress: 2nd - 0:00, Colts 10 - Buccaneers 7
Next game: Philadelphia Eagles @ Buffalo Bills, Oct 9 1:00pm ET

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

That top result has an image beside it and does link to nfl.com BUT it's not the title used by NFL.com and those little snippets may answer the question a visitor wanted answered. *click* done browsing, no need to visit NFL.com.

Google is scraping NFL.com in that instance for information to generate an EXTRA result ABOVE the nfl.com official site. I'd like to know how many visitors are lost because of the added data in the snippet of those continually updated extra links.

And I'd like to know how to prevent Google from creating these.

[wheel]

Cloak. Start serving Google the content with no markup tags or layout info - give them just paragraph after paragraph of text.

Let 'em figure out how to scrape and reparse from there.

[tedster]

Here's some input about the sports information that appears at the top of a SERP - from Google's Search Features page:

Sports Scores
To see scores and schedules for sports teams type the team name or league name into the search box. This is enabled for many leagues including the National Basketball Association, National Football League, National Hockey League, and Major League Baseball.

All sports data provided by STATS LLC

[google.com...]
STATS LLC is currently a joint venture between News Corporation and the Associated Press. STATS LLC has had a long history, and forged a lot of agreements with the eighty-some sports leagues they cover world-wide. reference [en.wikipedia.org]

Other types of "search features" are also covered on Google's Search Features page [google.com], and most of them appear to be internal services that Google provides, rather than being outsourced, like sports.

[londrum]

i remember a thread i was in ages ago about UK football fixtures. i am involved with an events site and we innocently listed all the upcoming fixtures. we were then contacted by the football league (or their associates, i cant remember exactly) demanding that we remove them because, believe it or not, the UK football fixtures are under copyright. you cant reproduce a calendar of games without paying them loads of money. the dates of the upcoming games are copyrighted. it sounds crazy, but its true.

but when i search for "manchester united" now, or any other league team, i can see google listing the next game above the official site, exactly like the OP's NFL example.

any webmaster that included the next fixture for every league team on their site would have to pay for the privilege. but presumably google just scrapes it.

[tedster]

No, the sports information is not scraped. Google licenses the data through companies like STATS LLC and that company handles the financial and legal arrangements where needed.

----

The thing is, sports was just an example. I don't think that's the market that Sgt_Kickaxe is involved in - and it's not clear where the other types of data are coming from. There may well be other licensing agreements in place, but so far I couldn't track that information down.