The search results for Google and Bing now include rich snippet data from LinkedIn.
When you search Google for a well-known person combined with the word LinkedIn, that person’s LinkedIn result will also feature rich snippet data containing their job title, where they work, and their location.
Here are some images showing the LinkedIn rich snippets on Google for Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts:
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer:
And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella:
The rich snippets are definitely from LinkedIn, they aren’t pulling the data from another source such as Google+. While people often have the same job titles on all profile pages on various sites, these rich snippets are definitely unique to LinkedIn. These don’t have the usual authorship formats, where it links to all articles written, as well as the number of Google+ circles the person is in.
This does seem to be either a limited test that Google is running at this time or is just starting to roll out, as not everyone sees the change with the new LinkedIn rich snippets when doing the same search. Samuel Edwards from TenthWave was the first to notice the change with rich snippets in Google, but he noted that only one of his coworkers was able to see the new LinkedIn rich snippets.
Bing is also showing the same LinkedIn rich snippets, although in a slightly different format.
Instead of the position, business name, and location, Bing shows job title, business name, the industry the person works in, and the number of connections the user has. Although the industry looks a little bit clunky when viewing the search results, the number of connections is pretty useful in the snippet. Depending on the length of the rich snippet, some results also show the person’s location.
Here’s how the LinkedIn rich snippets look on Bing for Cutts, Mayer, and Nadella:
On Bing, the number of connections shown is accurate as of the last time Bingbot crawled the page, so it isn’t real time, as evidenced by Cutts’ Bing search result that shows him with 360 connections, while the why version actually shows more than 500.
It appears that Bing is showing the LinkedIn rich snippets for all users and isn’t a limited rollout as Google appears to be doing.
“We’ve partnered with LinkedIn to bring content into Bing for several years,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Search Engine Watch. “LinkedIn, Twitter, and other partners show up in the results and also for entities, which we’re constantly adding, in Snapshot.”
Yahoo, despite getting their search results from Bing, doesn’t show rich snippets from LinkedIn within their own search results.
We’ve also reached out to Google and LinkedIn and will add any updates.