For the past few months I’ve been trying to integrate the schema.org microformat into my restaurant review site so that my Google search results for a restaurant will contain rich markup such as the star ratings, average price, etc.. However, these efforts have completely failed. The Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool says that my pages are marked up completely and even shows the correct rich markup search snippet. But for some reason the real-world search snippets don’t even come close to matching. I’ve contacted Google a few times over the past few month but they have never gotten back to me. I’ve even gone as far as trying to emulate Yelp’s markup but even that has failed. Does anyone know what’s going on?
- Here is an example of a restaurant page: http://peepmeat.com/restaurant.php?id=88
- Here is that page in the Rich Snippet Testing Tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpeepmeat.com%2Frestaurant.php%3Fid%3D88
- And here is a Google search for the page: https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=peepmeat+Bonnie‘s+Grill
From that page:
Right now it seems that sites are manually approved to some degree. I suspect a combo of age, relevance, manually review etc is needed for them to show up.
This isn’t that surprising, as otherwise sites could just put whatever markup they felt like, and Google would misrepresent them in their SERPs.
I wouldn’t say you are being penalised by the way – this isn’t a negative force suppressing your site, but a threshold you need to reach to be eligible.