The Android Market, Apple iTunes, and CNET were among the earliest sites to began using rich application snippets, which were announced in September. These snippets will be important and includable for any software developer website, software publishers, download portals, software review sites, and so on.
If we inspect the new pages about these software snippets at Google’s Webmaster Help we find that it is a rich snippet for all kinds of software applications, not just mobile apps – though for “mobile” software applications there are two additional attributes that define which countries are supported by that app and which are not.
It seems that right now a corresponding specification of this format is still missing on schema.org.
Here are two examples from the German SERPs including a German tech magazine that has a big software review and download area.
It’s noteworthy that the images included in the SERPs with these software application snippets are even larger than the images that appear with author rich snippets. See this comparison:
There is no doubt that whoever gets these snippets first will have a great competitive advantage because they will surely lead to higher click-through rates (CTRs).
For examplary code, check the lower part of this page. Like with all rich snippets/microformats Google will presumably prefer the ones that are more complete and detailed.
If you include this software meta data try to give some meaningful data in all possible attributes and not just the required ones. If you can squeeze in another mention of the name of the software or a generic keyword like “download” in some of the attributes it may even help your rankings as well.
Finally, don’t forget to test your new rich snippets and apply to get cleared by Google to get those great extensions in the SERPs so they can boost your CTRs.