Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Has anyone seen a ranking boost by adding a GTIN (barcode)
-
Hi All,
I wondered if anyone has seen any ranking improvements from adding a GTIN (barcode) number to their product pages?
-
Thought I'd provide a bit of an update on this one for you all, I add the gtin number to two different products one gtin was added as a product attribute (text and number) and the other was added with schema markup (Gtin14 - https://schema.org/gtin14).
I've seen no ranking boost to either product on the keywords I'm tracking for them however, I have seen a small increase in traffic to the product which uses schema markup. From what I can tell from my analytics it would appear that some users actually search google using the gtin number!
It seems as if gtin14 isnt widely used at present and as such I'm ranking in top spot. So i'm thinking of adding the gtin to all our products as a bit of a quick win to rank top for a small percentage of searches.
i suppose it all depends on what products your selling and your user demographic as to wether your potential customers would ever search using the gtin? My personal view after some more reading (gs1 smart search, formally gtin on the web - http://www.gs1.org/gs1-smartsearch) is that gtin is going to become more prominent in the not too distant future, but hey I'm no expert. I'd love to know if anyone else has tested this out or if they try it and get the same results as I have?
-
Thanks for the response Dmitrii, I haven't seen the GTIN used anywhere so it got me thinking. I try testing it and see what happens.
Cheers Jon
-
Hi there.
I personally haven't seen any ranking boost from barcodes, in fact I don't think I've ever seen barcodes being used on websites at all

However, even if Google can read and understand what barcodes stand for, it would get only the name of product, maybe SKU number, manufacturer etc. - none of the important stuff. You gonna have all that information on a page anyway, but what would make a difference is compelling description, which is not transferrable with barcodes.
So, no, I haven't seen boost, I don't think it would help no matter if Google can understand barcodes or not.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Thoughts on adding "near me" to title tag for local SEO?
I want to lean out my title tags and will most likely be doing an A/B test. They currently have the "Near Me" modifier in there, which I believe Google can distinguish local SEO without it. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | imjonny1230 -
Is a Mega Menu with over 300 links in it hurting my rankings?
I got hit pretty badly by Panda 4.0 (1/3 of my traffic lost), and I'm fairly certain it was because Google had potentially indexed over 20 million pages from a site filtering piece of software and got done for duplicate content. I have since fixed that using URL Parameters and that 20 million is down to 2.7 million now and I have submitted a clean site map, so now I wait. I have just done a site relaunch and am trying to determine if there are any other issues. I run an online store, and I have a mega menu with well over 300 links in it - makes the user experience really quick and easy to jump exactly where you want - and then I have about 30 links in the footer. I know there's a 'no more than 100 links on a page' guideline for Moz, but does anyone know if Google is smart enough to see the same header / footer navigation structure on every page of a site and know it's navigation and not water down the rest of the links, or do I need to re-think and simplify my navigation? It's one of those things that's there for a user experience and now I'm worried that I'm being penalised. The site is www dot shopnaturally dot com dot au
On-Page Optimization | | sparrowdog0 -
Have you seen an increase in your Rankings after improving your TTFB rate?
After reading the Post by ZOOMPF http://moz.com/blog/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte I was wondering if any of you have optimized your TTFB and noticed improvements in rankings. Have you optimized and not noticed any differences?
On-Page Optimization | | JMacSupply0 -
Will "internal 301s" have any effect on page rank or the way in which an SE see's our site interlinking?
We've been forced (for scalability) to completely restructure our website in terms of setting out a hierarchy. For example - the old structure : country / city / city area Where we had about 3500 nicely interlinked pages for relevant things like taxis, hotels, apartments etc in that city : We needed to change the structure to be : country / region / area / city / cityarea So as patr of the change we put in place lots of 301s for the permanent movement of pages to the new structure and then we tried to actually change the physical on-page links too. Unfortunately we have left a good 600 or 700 links that point to the old pages, but are picked up by the 301 redirect on page, so we're slowly going through them to ensure the links go to the new location directly (not via the 301). So my question is (sorry for long waffle) : Whilst it must surely be "best practice" for all on-page links to go directly to the 'right' page, are we harming our own interlinking and even 'page rank' by being tardy in working through them manually? Thanks for any help anyone can give.
On-Page Optimization | | TinkyWinky0 -
Hey guys! I was looking at adding the H1 tag lower on the page than the H2 tag because I want the top bit to be a call to action. Is this proper practice?
Hey guys! I was looking at adding the H1 tag lower on the page than the H2 tag because I want the top bit to be a call to action. Is this proper practice?
On-Page Optimization | | Web3Marketing870 -
Anyone knows h1, h2, h3..h6 plugin for wordpress?
Can anyone share which is the good plugin of wordpress for header tags?
On-Page Optimization | | surajrathore0 -
Need help with fluctuating ranking for a specific keyword
my website www.totalmanagement.com fluctuates for the search term: web based property management software I have been using SEO Moz for a few months now and have managed to get to the top 5 and jump around between 3 and 5. Does anyone have any suggestions to assist me? Long term goal is also to really target: Property Management Software But I am still very new at this. Thanks in advance for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | dgruhin0 -
Do images on a CDN affect my Google Ranking?
I have recently switched my images to a CDN (MaxCDN) and all of the images within my post are now get loaded directly from the CDN. Will this affect my Google ranking? Do Google care if the image is hosted physicaly on the domain?
On-Page Optimization | | Amosnet0