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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.

Thanks Ryan, not too concerned about the process of performing a 301, just looking more for agreement on if it's the best practice in this scenario.  Some sites (who do things well) 301 on the IP, others don't so I wasn't sure if I was missing something.

thanks again.

I apoligize if this question as been asked before, I couldnt' find in the Q&A though.

I noticed Google has been indexing our IP address for some pages (ie: 123.123.123.123/page.html instead of domain.com/page.html). I suspect this is possibly due to a few straggler relative links instead of absolute, or possibly something else I'm not thinking of.

My less-evasive solution a few months back was to ensure canonical tags were on all pages, and then replaced any relative links w/ absolutes.  This does not seem to be fixing the problem though, as recently as today new pages were scooped up with the IP address.

My next thought is to 301 redirect any IP address URL to the domain, but I was afraid that may be too drastic and that the canonical should be sufficient (which it doesn't seem to be). Has anyone dealt with this issue?  Do you think the 301 would be a safe move, any other suggestions?

thanks.

Hey Tom, although everything you're proposing below in regards to SEO is great, and should be done anyway, I don't think that's the reason you're seeing poor (or no) performance in Google Shopping.

Disclaimer, my knowledge of Google Product Search is limited to my experience in the U.S. There may be a whole different set of requirements for the UK.

Over the last few months Google Product Search has been rolling out additional requirements and perhaps their most recent update(s) affected you.  I can't say for sure, but I'd make sure you are providing every attribute possible that they request, even the 'suggested' attributes. Additionally, make sure you are not providing more than one record for each Unique Product Identifier. Glancing at your site, I could not find any product SKU / UPC, etc. associated with your products, but that doesn't mean you're not providing it to Google.

See here the the most recent update: Google Products Search Feed Specs/Policy Changes

Hope this helps.

Do you have a Google Merchant Account? You need to set up a product data feed for your products to appear there.

I've actually wondered the same before. To the best of my knowledge I've never heard anyone cite overflow: auto; as a negative signal compared to the amount of press display: none; text-indent: -9999px; etc. gets.  It very well could be abused just as badly though.  The only way I could think of an abuse-check would be to weigh the amount of text in the corresponding div against what a practical min-height of that div should be, but that seems a bit excessive.

I agree with Steven, it's come to a point where these css techniques have very legitimate uses and probably shouldn't be penalized.  Plus, there's plenty of other ways to accomplish the same thing, whether it's document tree manipulation or any other kind of rendering of a page after the crawable URL has been loaded. So at what point is it worth fighting such a thing?

edit: on a side note, what's the deal with those crazy underscores at the end of the URL? yuck.

I agree with EGOL, unless your current URLs are absolutely driving you nuts, I'd leave as is.  Plus 301s never direct 100% of the link juice so you'd most likely be hurting yourself.

Those reviews are not from Google marketplace (Google Merchant Center).  It's done through Rich Snippets. There are a few standards right now, namely microformats, microdata, RDFa, and Good Relations.  I've experimented with the RDFa tags to some success but haven't been able to achieve the reviews straight-up in all organic results.

Once you choose a format you can test your pages here.

Yep, they sure do.  You can find more here which briefly discusses site hierarchy and spreading link juice based on your domain weight.  Depending on your domain authority you might want to be more selective on the "widgets" you choose to link to, at least higher up on the page.

Hey Peter, try this in a yahoo search: link:http://www.google.com/ site:.edu

Then go to 'advanced search' and select the 'last 3 months' option.

Example

Do you have a Google Merchant Account? You need to set up a product data feed for your products to appear there.

Those reviews are not from Google marketplace (Google Merchant Center).  It's done through Rich Snippets. There are a few standards right now, namely microformats, microdata, RDFa, and Good Relations.  I've experimented with the RDFa tags to some success but haven't been able to achieve the reviews straight-up in all organic results.

Once you choose a format you can test your pages here.

Yep, they sure do.  You can find more here which briefly discusses site hierarchy and spreading link juice based on your domain weight.  Depending on your domain authority you might want to be more selective on the "widgets" you choose to link to, at least higher up on the page.

Motava, here's a video where Matt Cutts discuses the nofollow attribute on internal links.  Generally I'd agree with EGOL and say it's a bad idea to place nofollow tags on pages that you do want followed in other locations.

You could get fancy and place the links in a subfolder restricted by a robots.txt file and generate them via ajax or javascript, but that's probably not worth the added effort.

I agree with EGOL, unless your current URLs are absolutely driving you nuts, I'd leave as is.  Plus 301s never direct 100% of the link juice so you'd most likely be hurting yourself.

Hey Tom, although everything you're proposing below in regards to SEO is great, and should be done anyway, I don't think that's the reason you're seeing poor (or no) performance in Google Shopping.

Disclaimer, my knowledge of Google Product Search is limited to my experience in the U.S. There may be a whole different set of requirements for the UK.

Over the last few months Google Product Search has been rolling out additional requirements and perhaps their most recent update(s) affected you.  I can't say for sure, but I'd make sure you are providing every attribute possible that they request, even the 'suggested' attributes. Additionally, make sure you are not providing more than one record for each Unique Product Identifier. Glancing at your site, I could not find any product SKU / UPC, etc. associated with your products, but that doesn't mean you're not providing it to Google.

See here the the most recent update: Google Products Search Feed Specs/Policy Changes

Hope this helps.