Any value to shoehorning less applicable rich snippets into a page?
-
I've been wondering something about rich snippets for a while. I can plainly see how rich snippets and micro-data stuff can be super helpful for pages that feature things like event schedules, recipes, specific products with reviews, and articles written by influential authors. But is it worth trying to force micro-data into pages that don't readily lend themselves to the established rich snippet archetypes?
For example, say I was making a website for a carpet cleaning service. The company provides a service, rather than selling a tangible product, so there aren't individual items of which to tag pictures and reviews. The company doesn't hold any kind of events, so the scheduling stuff doesn't apply. The company doesn't necessarily present itself with any one person as the "face of the company", so there isn't anyone to tag as the "author" of the content. And obviously (I hope), people should not be eating/drinking carpet detergents, so recipes wouldn't work.
Given these restrictions, is it of any value to use any of the more generic micro-data structures like "thing" (http://schema.org/Thing) or "intangible" (http://schema.org/Intangible) to mark up stuff like "this is a picture of a carpet that we cleaned, but you can't actually buy from us"? Or are the rich snippets more of an "if your content fits with one of Google's promoted use cases, that's great, but otherwise don't bother" situations?
Thanks!
-
If it isn't going to be so much work that it will wreck the budget or take someone off of something more urgent, I would use schema markup on anything on which it can be legitimately used - regardless of whether or not Google is currently showing that particular itemtype. Google currently only uses some of them, but will probably add more later.
Other sites are starting to use the markup for things like Offers, too. Pinterest just announced that they are now going to have "rich pins", for example.
So you can add the markup now and be a little ahead of the game, or wait until you need to catch up.
-
Obviously you'll want to take this with a grain of salt (because I don't have any real, definitive knowledge about this), but I would guess that address and phone number information would be useful (or at least not harmful). If nothing else, it might help standardize the contact information that various directory scrapers get from a website, so you won't have your fax number listed as your phone number.
-
The "offer" example was more what I was getting at. There are schemas for things like offers, local business, and certain kinds of services, but my understanding of rich snippets is that their main value is to display a "fancier" Google search result. But since Google has so far only implemented micro-data enhanced listings for certain types of information (like store hours, event dates, and recipe ingredients), is there any other reason to mark up company details on a page that are 100% accurate and verifiable, but not necessarily the kind of thing that would be displayed on a search listing (such as a local business's founding date)?
-
Those rich snippets abuse penalties are already here.
Sha
-
Hi,
Jumping in with an additional, related question-
-what do you think about rich snippets for location and/or phone number?
Thanks!
-
Yeah.... it sounds like a "don't bother" situation, with these possible exceptions:
Testimonials - You can use aggregate review markup your testimonials page, just make sure the reviews are all legit and verifiable. Not sure if or how Google might verify these, and it seems prone to gaming it
Does the company provide specific service packages like "3 Rooms for $X.00"? That may work as an "Offer" even though it is not a tangible product. http://schema.org/Offer
-
Be careful, very careful. Matt Cutts has already warned about possible future penalties for people abusing rich snippets.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is my home page ranking much higher than my collection page?
Hi everyone, Why is my client's home page ranking high for a certain keyword phrase rather than a collection page I have which is well optimised for this keyword? The collection page is on the 10th SERPs page. I did see there were keywords used in the footer of page and the keyword was also used in some intro text on the home page so I removed the keyword from these two places nearly 2 weeks ago and requested google to reindex both the collection page and home page and I've not seen any improvement of the collection page's ranking in SERPs. I also changed the meta description and meta title as the ctr was poor but there wasn''t that many impressions either. It is a competitive keyword organically so maybe the collection page's authority is just not good enough compared to the competitors hence why they are choosing the home page as it has higher page authority however this still is not helpful to searchers who land on home page. Does anyone have any ideas of what else I can do to get google to rank the ocllection page higher for the keyword instead of home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TZ19820 -
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
How would the rich snippets be treated in AJAX website?
Hi guys We have started to rewrite our website http://www.edamam.com on AJAX, and the idea is to have all the website on AJAX in the next few months. Although it would probably be difficult to index even with the Google Crawling protocol, and some other issues might appear, the engineers insist that from technology point of view this is the best way to go. We have already rewritten the internal search result pages, e.g. http://www.edamam.com/recipes/pasta and last week we set the Google Crawling protocol for AJAX to some of the individual recipe pages to test it. I'd like to ask for you opinion on whether the rich snippets we have in the search results will be affected by this change? Are there specific actions we need to take to preserve them? What other hot tips you have for dealing with AJAX on any level of the website? Thanks in advance Lily
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wspwsp0 -
Which index page should I canonical to?
Hello! I'm doing a routine clean up of my code and had a question about the canonical tag. On the index page, I have the following: I have never put any thought into which index path is the best to use. http://www.example.com http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/index.php Could someone shed some light on this for me? Does it make a difference? Thanks! Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan_Phillips1 -
Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?
Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its basic question 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
.Create and implement rich snippets
How to create better rich snippets and where to place HTML code in the web page.If anyone answer with example on webpage location of code that would make me understand eaisly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000