Ecommerce Website Product Rich Snippet Image

[MonsterWeb28]

Greetings Mozzers,

I'm working on an ecommerce site and my goal is to have the product rich snippets on each of them however, I would like an image to start displaying in the SERPs.  Looking for some guidance on this issue.  Here is a well phrased questioned I found that sums up my thoughts:

Product schema has the "image" attribute, but it is not displayed in rich snippets in SERP. However, there is recipe schema and it allows to show image directly on SERP. It means that we can define two entities on a page (product and recipe, it is allowed) and it should display an image from recipe's part + the rest of information (price, availability) from product's part. I know it is a dirty hack and semantically incorrect, but will it work? If so, would it affect rankings or not? Any other drawbacks?

Thank you for any advice/clarification!

[MonsterWeb28]

Great thought, I'll try to make sure the intent is actually have the cooking recipes for the product in a prominent place, and then have products beside it to show you can buy this product to complete your recipe.

Thanks for you time!

[Adam_Cochran]

I'd be careful as I still don't know if Google would class a product formula as a 'recipe'. It certainly wouldn't if your product was shampoo - and I don't know if the edible nature of your product fits the bill.

A big part of Google guidelines come down to 'intent' and when a user searches recipes it's because they want to make something themselves, not buy something and that may be where you come into some conflict!

Good luck!

[MonsterWeb28]

Thank you for your advice and thoughts on the matter.  The product I'm selling is coconut oil, thus we actually do have recipes on the page as well.  I'm thinking since it is a product page and we do have recipes, the potential of both displaying has to be an increased possibility.

[Adam_Cochran]

Well I have to commend you for thinking outside the box - I've seen a few attempted approaches at this but never pulling in recipe snippets before.

Would it work - I don't think so, I think Google calls on the Rich Snippets (excluding Authorship) only in relational context. Basically what this means is Google is well aware based on the user search if someone is looking for a product or a recipe and from my understanding would likely only pull the appropriate micro-form data. That being said, I've not tested this. Your best bet would be to start by using the rich snippet test tool to see what displays (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets)

As for what would happen if it did work - you wouldn't see any impact negatively on your SEO I imagine, but you certainly would see a spike in CTR which would ultimately boost your SEO. People love pictures and you'd be in a unique and highlighted position for that search result.

However, at this point I feel it's fair to warn you that you may be in a grey area when it comes to Google's policy. In the Rich Snippets Guidelines (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2722261?hl=en) it is discussed that webmasters have a responsibility to ensure that their information is properly represented and not misleading. While you aren't exactly tricking your clients, the fact that you are declaring a product image in the recipe category may in fact violate this policy. This policy is not an automatic one and therefore not black and white. It's really up to the Rich Snippets Manual Review team (which is surprisingly extensive). Punishments can include manual removal from the rich snippets program permanently and manual trust/quality penalties that would harm your SEO long term.

So while this may be possible, and may be temporarily beneficial I would personally advise against anything but proper micro-form markup.