Find good quality partners using rich snippets since TBPR is broken

[goodroi]

Matt Cutts mentioned that Google is moving towards only displaying rich snippets in the serps for reputable websites. This means that if you see a website display rich snippets in the serps, then they are likely not a spammy site in Google's view and a potential safe website for you to partner with.

This can be very useful when you need to judge new websites that have no toolbar pagerank since Google broke the toolbar pagerank and will not fix it for at least several more months.

[ken_b]

Wouldn't you need a fairly high degree of confidence in Googles ability to determine what is and is not spammy to use the appearance of rich snippets in the serps as a guide to site quality?

Maybe a good sign for sites with rich snippets, but not a guarantee of high quality.

Probably not a reliable signal of low quality for sites without rich snippets.

As always, proceed with caution.

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[EditorialGuy]

Wouldn't you need a fairly high degree of confidence in Googles ability to determine what is and is not spammy to use the appearance of rich snippets in the serps as a guide to site quality?

Plus, "moving toward" isn't the same as "having arrived."

Probably not a reliable signal of low quality for sites without rich snippets.

That's definitely true. Also, rich snippets are for pages, not for sites, and not all pages from a site show up in the SERPs with rich snippets all the time.

Still, goodroi's basic idea seems reasonable: If you see rich snippets for a page (especially six months or a year from now), the author probably isn't on Google's "spammers we hate" list.