It is true, a site can lose their rich snippets over quality issues or never get the rich snippets in the first place. But what is not true is that if you do have rich snippets, it doesn’t 100% mean all of Google’s algorithms think your site is high quality. It just means that you past the benchmark of quality for your site to show rich snippets in the Google search results.

Google’s John Mueller said this in the Google webmaster hangout from this morning on YouTube at the 9:42 mark.

The question was:

He answered:

Yes, I have heard SEOs say, if a site has rich snippets, it means Google thinks the site is high quality. I guess that is not 100% true.

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at Google+.