Icons in search results

[asabbia]

Try search imesh on google.com, the 4th results has an icon of the program near the search result:

[img141.imageshack.us...]

Imo this is an incredible advantage in SERPs.

As you can see there isn't only the pic, but other info too:

"85 votes, free, windows, utilities/tools"

Does anyone know how to achive that?

[tedster]

It's a kind of "rich snippet". In addition to the text parts, with a software application you also have the possibility of seeing the dedicated icon in the SERP - if you mark up the icon image with special syntax from the schema.org vocabulary.

The text parts of the snippet also depend on the mark-up you use, by the way. See Google Rich Snippet Help [google.com] for more details.

Google has been rolling out rich snippets in a graduated fashion, and just recently we're seeing a wider use of this kind of extended information.

[nomis5]

Agreed it's Rich Snippets and it's not only Google, Bing are rolling this out now in a major way.

Everyone needs to take a view on Rich Snippets and if they want to use it on their site. I've gone for it hook, line and sinker. The benefits are that you will probably get a picture against your entry in the SERPS and those much prized and attention grabbing stars. Entries with both of these definitely catch the eye of the viewer.

The downside is that you are effectively giving Google permission to use parts of your pages in the SERPS. The entry in Google for the football team I suuport now shows the latest results and their position in the league, all courtesy of the site using Rich Snippets. The site must be stupid to include that info in their Rich Snippets. I now have all the information I need about my football team and I rarely visit their site.

The lesson is clear, use Rich Snippets to get the results you want to appear in the SERPS but no more.

[asabbia]

Someone know how to exactly do that?

Which is the syntax to do that?

[Marshall]

asabbia,

As tedster said, check out Google help on the subject [google.com ] Found that page, you can get additional information on which format is best for what you want to achieve.

[nomis5]

Make sure you choose the version which will be suported by Google and Bing the most. It is a real pain in the neck to implement Rich Snippets, you don't want to do it all again in five years time.

Another downside, according to scrapers, is that labelling up your pages with Rich Snippetrs enables scrapers to steal content more easily. Again this can be mitigated by only supplying the information YOU deem worthy of being classified by Rich Snippets.

[rustybrick]

They are called Application rich snippets, see [google.com...]

[asabbia]

Which format do you suggest guys?

microdata
microformats
RDFa?

[Andem]

Ah yes, the site which posts 'reviews' which are normally rewritten product descriptions of what the original developer promotes their product as. Other sites have been using them for a while now before Google actually posted specifications.

I would suggest using the guidelines Google has posted which rustybrick has referenced. If you don't have that kind of content, I would suggestion against it.