It’s interesting that they reference Rich Snippets, but we haven’t seen examples yet of Microformat content displayed differently in the Maps search results.

That could partly be due to Reviews/Ratings data already receiving special treatment within Maps — so, no further special display would be necessary for that content. If your site had hReviews about lots of businesses, it might then be adopted as yet another data source for Google Place page content.

I’d conjecture we could be on the cusp of seeing some additional display treatments within Google Maps, however. For instance, it would make sense for businesses which host events to have some of those events displayed within their Place pages. If they’ve marked-up with hCalendar, we might start seeing that.

Additionally, this may enable Google to associate more citations about businesses with the corresponding Google Place pages (although, they’ve already been effective at doing that prior to paying special attention to Microformatting, for all we know).

Sweet, more incentive for those who provide a service but don’t use an actual address or work from home {hide address} to at least use this format for getting recognized for a city or zip code. Or would that even come into play? Good update Mike.

I don’t really perceive it as having a high risk of increasing spam.

If you’re a small business, it’s natural to provide more info about one’s own biz — but a small biz site that abruptly starts displaying info about other businesses is likely to not be trusted for that content.

Likewise, if you’re a business directory site with some level of established trust and fairly good quality score, your content about other businesses may be accepted for display — but, if you are not trusted, your content might not be allowed to flow.

Domenick: Microformat is not a way for hiding info on a page, by and large. A business which doesn’t provide street address still would not be able to display street address when using Microformats. Microformat is a way to structure data — it’s not really another way of delivering invisible metadata. So, this isn’t any incentive at all for people to attempt to hide content.

This opens the possibility of review services collecting reviews through many means and feeding them to Google. Hmmmm… Very interesting. The line “if additional opportunity arise” seems to mean that you will still have to be hand picked for reviews to feed to places though. Any thoughts???

Nice article, Mike.

I view this announcement as one more way in which Google can add content to the Places Pages. Action after action shows that Google is making every effort to create content full Places Pages that will draw traffic.

To date, I don’t see the hard evidence that it is working dramatically well at the moment but I suspect its a long haul campaign. I saw several instances of the “create free photographs” inside retailers’ businesses campaign. It was fascinating. Generally the retailers were open, happy, and excited to get this free exposure from Google.

I don’t believe they thought through the full scale scope of this campaign..and probably they shouldn’t be concerned…..but it was one more case where google was making an effort to expand content into Places Pages (and in that case spending significant money and effort to do so).

I can think of several sites with reviews that would benefit from the additional exposure of having their content/reviews picked up by Google….and Google gets the opportunity to get more access to more content for the Places pages…..something they clearly have targeted.

On the issues of Reviews I experienced something for the first time. I was looking at the reviews for several restaurants, and first went to places pages for the eateries. G Places had aggregated plenty of reviews.

I found myself though feeling unsatisfied and then turned to Yelp reviews for these places. I realized I had bought into the concept of Yelp as the “ultimate” review source.

After reading the Yelp reviews on the same restaurants…there was no discernable difference. Reviews were reviews. Some liked the restaurants-some didn’t. Some wrote engaging critiques in the aggregated reviews found in G Places and some didn’t. Likewise Yelp carried engaging reviews and non engaging/non informative reviews.

Yelp began to lose its mystigue over me.

If Google aggregates reviews from many sources…and also picks and chooses whose reviews it will show and whose it won’t…..it could have a power over the vitality of certain sites.

Now that is a concept I hadn’t considered before.