Today Google announced another new feature of Rich Snippets called Events. Of course it is a great idea to provide more markup to better track events of concerts, sporting events, movies, etc. However, what if Rich Snippets could be used for a slightly different reason? News updates on events or people. Let me show you what I mean with a real world example. . .
As I’ve mentioned tons of times before, I run a site called FantasySP which is a news aggregator for fantasy player news. What if for each player page, I add event data for each update? That way, when someone Google’s “Tim Lincecum”, they can at a glance quickly see his 3 latest updates right within the Google search page! I know this isn’t how Google intended it to be, but the results speak for themselves. Have a look:
Appearing right in the Google SERPS would be the 3 latest updates, including when they came in, giving the searcher a clear indication how fresh the content is. I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts and comments on utilizing Rich Event Snippets in this manner.