I suspect there may be a bit of a clean up going on, as abuse of rich snippets seemed to be on the rise fairly considerably. I imagine they'll return for genuine sites that have suddenly lost them.

Clean ups are always needed and well called for, especially in a world where spam once paid off.

I noticed they were disappearing on some of the financial serps a month or so ago. They were fake ratings.

I noticed hReview snippets stopped showing for LOCAL results about a month ago. I had DOUBLE organic + Places stars for a lot of clients, which was cool while it lasted.

Then hReview in regular organic started to disappear about a month ago. Everyone in my market below my #1 spot lost their stars. But it's weird mine still show most of the time. BUT they come and go some days. I'd say they are up maybe 70% of the time.

So bug or clean up due to too much rich snippet spam? Just not sure.

Linda

There's definitely something going on over the last few days with Google. I added Schema.org microdata reviews the beginning of last week and the stars all came up nicely a day later on all my landing pages.

5 days ago I changed the microdata types to more accurately reflect the content (eg. product to service, votes to reviews) and since then only 1 landing page had changed and some have lost their stars all together. The one that has changed is not showing some of the microadata (such as img) that the preview tool shows it should.

On top of this, these specific pages all seem to have messed up title tags - the cached version source codes are all correct and up-to-date but the SERPs seem to show title formats from months ago and malformed at that.

So I wonder whether they are trying to roll something back and coalesce data elements?! Just drop the index and start again on the whole web Google ;)

Maybe they have gone back to white-listing too given the delay in change I am seeing compared to before. Or perhaps only certainly categories are un-white-listed?!

I have tons of em on my events. On client ecommerce sites, they seem to have been reduced down to "1-10 items" on a category page, but I haven't looked extensively yet.

@Alex997

We saw the same with videos. Google had recognised our videos as videos (through the schema.org info on the pages), and it had been showing them as video results with a thumbnail, duration, etc., but then they stopped showing as video results, and just looked like standard page listings.

Since then, they've started to come back as video results. The way it happened definitely looked like google had rolled back something.

@gregorysmith See the first question in his post.

I have my review stars back now for 3 inner pages (low PageRank) - but not my home page (high PageRank). They all have the same code structure and the home page usually gets crawled much more often that the inner pages - so it's a bit weird.

Maybe they have removed the ability for review stars on the home pages? I was seeing double blocks of stars on the local places searches - one for my rich snippets and one for google reviews. So perhaps they have blocked home pages to get rid of this unsightly layout?!

Maybe they dialed em down till they could get a handle on all the spam that inevitably started showing up.

Video from Google out today that explains what happens to the review stars in places:

[youtube.com...]

Perhaps this migration to local Google+ is messing with a lot of the rich snippets results.

[edited by: tedster at 5:55 am (utc) on Jun 2, 2012]
[edit reason] Link directly to the video [/edit]

As i think there is some refreshment process is running for rich snippets and it can take time to come with some genuine sites.

Has anyone had any NEW rich snippets display since last week?

eg. I have added author info to all my WordPress blog posts and none of the rich snippets have been added to SERPs yet.

I have also just tried to go back to a 'Product' schema.org schema (that was previously working) on my home page to see if that gets picked up.

...wondering if Google has stopped the spider whilst they make changes/clean up?

Still not seeing snippets except for Amazon's, insofar as e-commerce sites are concerned.

Marshall

Interesting, some maps/location snippets showed up on some of my events over the weekend; first time I've seen those on any of my sites.

I tried adding Schema.org event tags to my site's events page and the simulator just didn't seem to grab and display what I wanted it too.

@netgeg - what rich snippet language are you using may I ask?

Microdata - i.e. schema.org