ECommerce and microdata
-
Last year I rolled my own online shop and I included schema.org microdata for all the products. My Google ranking continued to improve during that period, but I was doing a number of improvements, so I can't say how much was due to the microdata.
My store continues to grow so I moved to an eCommerce solution. I opted to go with Volusion. Much to my surprise, about the only SEO feature they have implemented is SEO friendly URLs. They have not implemented microdata, which is pretty surprising given that all their sites are geared towards products. I would think it would be very easy for them to span the product name, description, price, etc, with a product schema.
I called CoreCommerce, a Volusion competitor, and they have not implemented microdata either.
Why are these large eCommerce providers ignoring microdata?
Are there eCommerce solutions that have implemented microdata?
Do large online retailers like Amazon and Buy use microdata?
Is there any data that shows the SEO benefits of implementing microdata for an online store?
Best,
Christopher -
Amazing! The question from Christopher was posted in 2012. 2 years later, Volusion still seem to be running years behind as far as online marketing goes. They have a reasonably good system for building an ecommerce website, but when it comes to online marketing, they struggle.
- They have still not implemented Microdata for products.
- Not only that but their Google Shopping Feed has to be Manually published, instead of allowing the feed to get updated periodically, like daily etc.
- They do not support all the latest fields and attribute details that Google Merchant centre now offer such as Mobile Links, Attribute Lengths
- Making Availability mandatory (which was enforced September 30, 2014)
- and so much more.
For Basic ecommerce the Volusion product seems great. As soon as you wish to really start utilising resources outside Volusion, Good Luck!
-
Amazon uses Schema with their products. We use product Schema on our eCommerce sites. My belief is that it will help from a rich snippets pov and simply that this is something the search engines want. The best way to get people to adopt is to show that it helps. That's my opinion anyway.
Best,
-
Thanks for the info and the link to the testing tool.
To be fair, I should add that Volusion has added rich snippets for reviews, and that's certainly a step in the right direction. However, companies rolling out a new shop typically have products and no reviews, so the product snippets could be used from day one if they were implemented.
I did come up with a hack to add a schema.org description to each of my products. I'll continue to look for a hack that allows me to put meta data around all product features like price and availability, but product description will have to do for now.
Best,
Christopher -
I don't have answers to all of your questions but I might be able to shed a little light on them.
I've not seen any major studies that show the benefit of microdata specifically on rankings. However when you look at the area of rich snippets for eCommerce as a whole then I have it on good authority (but haven't seen the data myself) that you can expect an increased CTR from having some forms of rich snippet. Whether you implement that change using microdata, microformats or RDFa is irrelevant. Here's one study I found.
I would hazard a guess that many eCommerce providers appear to be a little slow to implement microdata into their product because although Schema.org has been live for over a year microdata has only provided any tangible benefit in Google since April 2012 when Google updated rich snippets for products.
If you want to find out if a specific retail is using semantic data (again not just microdata in this case) then just take their product page URLs and paste them into the rich snippets testing tool.
Hope that helps a little.
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
-
Should Our Mobile Responsive Version of our Ecommerce Site include the on Page content to Help with Rankings
Hello All, We are soon to launch our new redesigned website along with a mobile responsive version but i have noticed we currently don't include the on page Content we have on the mobile version which we have on the desktop version to help with rankings etc. I am not sure how google does mobile research with regards to rankings. We have designed our responsive version to be as user friendly as possible at the expense of having to much clutter/content but I am wondering now , if we will rank on mobile if all our on page content isn't present. Just wondered if we should include it at the bottom of the pages with say a "Read more" extension to help avoid clutter? Any advice greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Web Design | | PeteC120 -
ECWID Ecommerce Sites. No Custom URLS?
Is there any way possible to be able to name product urls in website that use ECWID for their ecommerce? They have long and "dirty" urls. For example this running boards site: http://www.runningboards4less.com/general-motors#!/~/product/category=6593890&id=28043027 Isn't this hurting the overall SEO of the site? Especially product pages?
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Help with Schema.org on Ecommerce Products
I’m looking for ways of using schema.org with products that have pricing options. There appear to be two main problems 1) Whilst colour, width, height and depth are all catered for, size appears to be missing – how can we mark up products that are available in sizes that aren’t necessarily covered by width/height/depth (e.g. shoe size). Also, what if the product is available in different finishes – technically, these could not properly be described as colours so how could we mark them up? 2) There doesn’t seem to be any particularly good way of marking up pricing options that are displayed on the same product detail page. For e.g. if a pricing option table is used like this: | ID | Colour | Price 001-red | Red | £3.99 001-green | Green | £4.49 001-blue | Blue | £4.99 | I can mark up each row as an offer, and give each offer a price and sku or mpn, but then I can’t use itemprop=”color” to describe exactly what the option is. Would I just use itemprop=”name” in this case and abandon color altogether (even though it’s technically supposed to be describing the colour of the product and not the name of the offer)? I suppose another way I could approach it would be to mark up each row as an individual product, and assign each one an offer with the details as described above but then the containing page would effectively look like a separate product – which it isn’t. Any help or advice on this would be very much appreciated
Web Design | | paulbaguley0 -
Sitemap Question - Very Old Ecommerce Site, Never Used A Map
I help manage a family website, that has about 10,000 products... It was top ranked since 1996, then got smacked by Penguin and recovered but its still receiving only a fraction of the natural traffic it used to get. Something we have never used... Is a sitemap. I'm curious if anyone knows reliable software that will generate a sitemap? My cart is custom built, website uses html pages across the board. Dynamic content and parameters are set up properly, onsite seo is in the excellent range. The only thing that I haven't been utilizing is a sitemap. Because the cart was hand built, it would a huge convenience to use a lightweight program thats compatible with any website, has parameter settings, exclusions and anything else useful to negate any duplicate content. I have a few highly dynamic pages as well... If anyone knows a product or a possible solution, it would be much appreciated. Working it up myself would be very time consuming. Thx
Web Design | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Pleas Help! My microdata format disappeared?
Hi guys im new on this comunity, reacently i have an ishue taht i do not know how to solve. Google suggested that you can put microdata on my website and its look very cool on the organic search pages. So whtat happend. I have change my website to a new one with all rich snippets and microdata, submited a xml.sitiemap dinamic one that refresh every time when i putt something new on my website. do a redirection from my old site to a new one. All that google propose. I have check all the pages in webmaster tools and in a that tool google show everything, also microdata have shown on a google organic search aproximetly 7 days when he refresh my pages from old site. After that microdata and little stars just desapired from organic serch on google. I do not know why? I did not do anything. So can anyone help me how to return little stars on my links on google shown on organic serch. website: www.telekoplus.com hosted in Serbia Thank you in advance Beket Borocki P.S Sorry if i have mistakes in writing on English.
Web Design | | telekoplus0 -
Blog is outranking ecommerce store
My client has a blog that posts information about products to support its ecommerce store. The blog's main purpose is to support the products listed on the main website, but it has become so strong that its posts sometimes rank in the SERPS in place of the website product page, which is undesirable. The blog posts always link to the product that they are supporting. Are there any other methods, other than doing a 301, that could help the product page to rank instead of the blog post?
Web Design | | pugh0 -
What is the BEST eCommerce platform ?
I'm using BigCommerce, but I will like to try a new platform. Do you have any recommendations?
Web Design | | BigBlaze2050 -
Rel Canonical tag usage on ECommerce website
Hello, I have read up on the rel canonical tag and I'm ready to apply it to my site's categorization structure. However, I'm concerned that, because my website does not have a "view all" button for our product pages, the rel canonical tag would not be appropriate. For example, if you come to my site's main category url, you come to mysite.com/main-category At this level - you get the top 12 items in the category. if you want to see the next page, you click a crawlable link that goes to mysite.com/main-category12-24 etc. etc. The site does not offer a view all function. Would applying the rel canonical tag be appropriate in this instance, or do I have to let Google crawl and index each page independantly? Thanks.
Web Design | | Blenny0