First of all, if you don’t know what rich snippets are, they look like this:

See how the picture to the left shows who the author actually is, then their name right under the website address? That’s one version of rich snippets. This one is called Google Authorship. It gives Google and your readers an idea about who’s behind all the great content you’re writing. In this case, we’ve used Chadd as an example.

There’s a version of this that shows stars by the website’s snippet (the screen shot you see above is called the “snippet”). It looks like this:

One thing we’ve seen some websites do is try to manipulate what Google shows here by faking the reviews. Bad move. This is Rich Snippet abuse. Google will slap you with a penalty for this! Not only does it violate their Quality Guidelines for Rich Snippets, it’s just plain lame.

Don’t try to scheme the system folks! Have people leave you reviews on your Google+ profile or even on Yelp like above, but don’t try to get creative and spam the snippet!