Even saying the word “religion” on a search engine blog seems like stepping on a landmine and hoping it’s a dud. When technology and spirituality mix, it seems that the end result is quite predictably utter chaos and lots and lots of rage. That hasn’t prevented major sites from dipping into religious services, however. A recent addition from Google allows sites to add rich snippets that denote prayer times. With no denominational restrictions and some great tools for calculating specific prayer time details, it seems this markup option is a great boon – or it would, if Google wasn’t getting so confused about religion.
It’s not that Google is questioning the faith of its childhood or anything. Rather, Google’s markup has failed to include a few important fields. Most notably, there isn’t a field to provide the specific religion the prayer times are for. Hypothetically, the SERP – and thus the rich results associated with prayer times – will only populated with pages optimized for the appropriate faith, making such specification in the markup unnecessary. As explained by a Google representative, ranking is at the foundation of the system. Since you type in the name of the religion and the city, “if your site does not have a specific city and you are the only Jewish site, then the feature will not work. On the other hand, if let’s say, your site adds a city where your site is not highly ranked, the result might not be on the first page.” Recent testing, however, demonstrates that it’s not quite that simple.
Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land conducted a test where he implemented the markup for a site that gave prayer times for the Jewish faith. After going through an elongated white-listing process (wherein he had to contact multiple Google staff members to get his site cleared for the rich content) Schwartz found that the search results often pulled prayer times for the wrong religion.
The solution seems simple enough: add a “religion” field to the markup, or at least a more powerful algorithmic feature for pages that show the rich content. After all, while many people of faith will stay perfectly calm based on an inaccurate result, it would be wise for Google to avoid sending people to the wrong church.
[via Search Engine Land]
