Can never be too educated on best-practices.
Thanks!
]]>@Mike
I agree with you that there are abuses.
But it is not difficult to “do it right”… we are hoping that Google rewards the do it right strategy and punishes the abusers… but who knows.
]]>@Cary
Obviously Google scales everything with some sort of programatic approach and that includes enforcement. With rich snippets, like with Penguin and Panda, they started out manually, gradually the enforcement process runs as a separate task on some periodic basis and then finally it gets integrated into the on-going process that is Google quality/enforcement. They test and iterate, test and iterated until it achieves whatever level of abuse enforcement they feel is adequate. That doesn’t mean all abusers will be caught but the noise will be reduced to a dull roar.
I believe that is happening now. I think, but obviously can’t confirm, that they have moved beyond the manual mode into the periodic run “the separate process” mode and have started to automate whatever level of enforcement they are able to achieve. This is usually happening concurrently with the release of guidelines.
In the case of this review rich snippet abuse enforcement for misuse I believe it to be a situation where the stars are just not shown rather than any proactive penalty pushing a site down in rankings.
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