Rich Snippets Showing in Site:Search Queries Only?

[Leadhub]

Hey Mozzers,

I'm noticing that several sites of mine are triggering rich snippets for REVIEWS when I do site:search, however when I remove the site:search their results are stripped of rich snippets.

Any thoughts on this/others seeing similarities?

[DJ123]

Generally, the main search engine is taking those out of the SERPS.

I have seen the same out in the wild.

[webmethod]

The displaying of rich snippets - as with many Google "features" is completely discretionary on Google's part. I haven't come across this particular scenario before, but so long as the rich snippets are validated as being set up correctly I don't see that you have many options. If they used to display in main SERPs and now suddenly don't, take a look back through changes to your websites a few weeks prior to see if you've somehow affected them. The structured data report in Webmaster Tools should give you the historical data.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

George

[David-Kley]

Completely up to Google when they want to show them. Check here to make sure they are working.

[irvingw]

Some of our sites are seeing this as well. I would venture to say that this is a fluke and not a leading indicator that the snippets are coming back.

[KT684]

Yes, this is happening to us currently. Roughly 2 weeks ago I noticed that our rich snippets started appearing when doing a 'site:' query like you mentioned, but this was not the case 2 weeks prior.

Around the end of March our rich snippets for customer reviews abruptly disappeared from the SERPs after always displaying basically since Google adopted displaying rich snippets. All URLs pass the snippets testing tool, and we have not seen any return to natural search results.

[Saijo.George]

Could this be a part of an A/B test to see the impact of Rich Snippets on the SERP ?