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Google testing phone numbers & H1 tags in rich snippets

Google appears to be testing a new type of rich snippet today derived from a combination of the sites telephone number and the “alt” or “title” attribute of the sites logo.

An example of this is shown in the screenshot below, you can see how Superbreak has managed to make use of this to get a very nice snippet for quite a few different keywords including “theatre breaks“. It’s not clear whether they have done this intentionally however I can’t find any other sites exhibiting the same behaviour.

New rich snippet

The snippet is made up of the phone number and the H1 tag, which in the case of Superbreak is also the title tag of the main site logo as you can see in the screenshot below. The number is being taken from another part of the page and Google is combining it with the H1 tag.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 2:23pm ON Tuesday, 15 February 2011

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://twitter.com/reiniernl/ Reinier

    Nice find! Don’t you think that the microformats trigger the rich snippets in the search results rather than the H1 element?
    It is noteworthy to see that apparently the text of the title attribute is deemed more important than the anchor text. At least when it comes to an element with microformats.
    It would be interesting to test how different content (phone numbers in the title attribute and anchor text) affect the rich snippets in the search results.

    Greetings from the Netherlands,

    Reinier

  • http://www.brentnau.com brentnau

    I think Internet Marketers miss out on the opportunity to include the business phone number in the meta description tag. In mobile browsers the phone number gets linked to make an easy one click call right from the search results. In the example above, this may be an extension of that to enhance the mobile experience for users by bubbling up the business phone number into the snippet.

  • http://www.poweredbysearch.com Vlad Rascanu

    I haven’t seen these snippets yet. I wonder if they’ll be permanent. I hope they will be because this will help differentiate between search results a little better.

  • http://twitter.com/reiniernl/ Reinier

    I wonder if the use of the brand name or the domain name in the microformatted text on the particular web page has anything to do with the rich snippets showing up in the search results.
    The rich snippets also pop up for other queries, such as “city break”, “city break deals”, “last minute city trip”, “last minute hotel”, “weekend break” and “weekend breaks” (all without quotes), but only for Superbreak.com and not for other websites using microformats, such as Trip Advisor.

  • http://www.verticalmeasures.com AZArdie

    The importance of the H1 tag is always debated. Maybe it shouldn’t be anymore.

  • Pingback: SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 15, 2011

  • Lea

    Yes, they are definitely playing around with the results format atm.
    One of my sites is showing significant alterations to the title that make my pages appear much more important than I would ever claim they are – not that I am complaining! Don’t know how its happening, though…
    (No, the odp optout is there, and these are neither pages nor titles that dmoz would include anyway)

  • http://www.raisemyrank.com/ Bob Gladstein

    Reinier makes a good point. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a search engine index the contents of a title attribute before. Then again, it’s pretty rare to put a title attribute on an . I know I’ve never done it. The fact that it’s nested in a div with a class of “vcard” must have a lot to do with Google choosing to pay attention to the title.

  • http://www.brightonstagandhen.com Jimmy

    Doesn’t seem to be working for me when I try it…

    Seems that the text ‘Superbreak mini breaks’ is being hidden behind the image, but it’s not getting penalised. Maybe because the image has been placed there with CSS through the link. May be a good tactic…

  • http://www.returnondigital.com/dave-ashworth.php dave_ashworth

    Looks to me like they are trying to play around with the format, whether or not the title tag from the link was deliberate or not I’m not sure.

    Reason for this – they’ve used the vcard class to let Google know this is where the microformats information is to be found.

    They’ve set the link class to “org” for the organisation name – presumably they thought that it would take the anchor text, but it’s taken the title text – perhaps this is because they have set the height of the link to 0 – (i.e. hide the text and set the background as an image) – the same could be done using an image and alt tag, but the setting of height to 0 suggests they’re playing around with the SEO.

    The phone number within the vcard also had the correct text too so they’re definitely looking to use microformats in some way.

    The CSS of the logo box def suggests they are playing around with on site optimisation but I expect they still thought the company name would’ve been used.

    It would be interesting to see if you got the same results if you used an img within the html and set it’s ALT text to the company name / call to action.

  • http://www.searchengineoptimisationworks.com Paul

    Nice find Patrick. Looking at the source code, I am incline to believe that the H1 was just a coincidence on part of the site. They set it up there and Google took advantage of it. Perhaps seeing any of their competitor sites to see how they have the header displayed?

    But there is a lesson here – always alt and title tag your Logo.

  • Yousaf

    The mentioned snippets are no longer there in the SERPs.

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