Generating Rich Snippets without Structured Data
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I noticed something in Google search results today that I can't explain. Any help would be appreciated. I performed a real estate based search and the top result featured a rich snippet showcasing the following...
Address Price Bd/Ba
912 Garden District Dr #17. Charlotte, NC 28202 $179,990 3 / 2
222 S Caldwell St #1602. Charlotte, NC 28202 $389,238 2 / 2&1/2However, when I visit the page associated with this information, there is no Schema to be found. In fact, the page is, for the most part, just a large table listing homes on the market. The table headings are Address, Price, and Bd/Ba.
Is it common for Google to use table based data to generate rich snippets? What is the best way to influence this? In the absence of Schema (as the page we are talking about has no Schema implementation), does Google default to table data? Has anyone seen this behavior before and, if so, can you point me to it?
EDIT: I've now come across a few other examples where the information is not in a table, but rather in divs. Why are such sites (you can find some by searching for "[ZIPCODE] real estate") getting this treatment?
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I believe Google constantly updates its algorithms "quietly" to detect structured data. While they have listed several schema markups you can use now (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en), they are always finding new ways to detect them naturally (e.g. table/lists HTML tags in this case), without explicitly informing the users.
The best way forward is to format your site's data in the most semantic way possible, which will likely increase your chances of Google picking them up when they update their structured data detection algorithms.
Just my two cents
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I've had it happen to me too, with a site that uses tables for data. A search for site:strikemodels.com/products will show a few examples. I haven't done anything to encourage these results.
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Yes. Google will use formatted data even when there are not Rich Snippets. They will also pull from Lists. See this articles here: http://moz.com/blog/how-do-i-get-googles-bulleted-snippets
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