I was shocked a bit to hear this, since Google has said time and time again that rich snippets and structured markup doesn’t help your site rank higher in Google. But that might change in the future.

Google’s John Mueller dropped a hint this morning in a Google+ Hangout at the 21:40 mark that Google may, one day, use structured markup in their ranking algorithm.

John said that “over time, I think it [structured markup] is something that might go into the rankings as well.” He added his rational:

John Mueller, while not in charge of Google’s ranking algorithms, does have insight into what Google is thinking on that front added that “definitely makes sense to use structured data” for ranking in those situations. He said:

Watch the video below, feel free to skip back to where the question starts but I started at where John said they may use it in the future:

Forum discussion at Google+.