Do Schema.org changes impact local SEO
-
I've reviewed the various presentation and blog posts from SMX advanced regarding local SEO and I didn't see any mention of Schema.org and microformats. Has any research or case studies been presented supporting that implementation of Schema.org microformats will improve local results?
Here is one example where I've implemented the basics in the address info of the footer.
Any tips on how to further optimize with schema.org markup?
-
You would figure that if Google, Bing & Yahoo get behind a new standard for declaring what snippets of information mean through schema.org then at some stage soon, they will either be using those tags to hone in on specific parts of content more relevant to a search query or present more information to the viewer during a search.
The new section, article and heading tags of HTML5 would also seem to come in to the new richer data model for a web page. There has been a lot of work standardising these tags, so it would be a logical deduction to consider they along with personalization factors will become more prevalent in future.
-
The Google FAQs about places and rich snippets (which you're going to generate by adding schema.org markup) says that they will not negatively or positively impact rankings. But...
I'm going to suggest that it almost certainly seems like they will, -if- you can get Google to pick them up from your site and add them to your places listing.
Obviously, the number of reviews that Google can pull from other local-portal sites is a ranking factor. In May, Mike Blumenthal wrote a blog post which identified places listings where he had seen Google including hreview testimonials pulled directly from the business's own website.
I'm skeptical that Google is going to treat these reviews differently from reviews from other sources, and somehow exclude them from their ranking algo for places. If Google didn't believe that the reviews are valid, then they wouldn't include them in the first place, because it would make for a really poor user experience. If they're not excluding them for user experience reasons, I doubt they'll exclude them from being a ranking factor. Which means, to me, that (if you can get the picked up) they'll have a positive impact on rank.
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
-
Title Tag Change - Drop in Organic Placement?
I've been working on increasing CTR my changing the title tag & meta descriptions. Has anyone ever noticed a drop in organic SERPS from doing so? Even if CTR goes up? It seems to me that if the CTR goes up and user experience in that way is improved these changes should yield an increase in the average position. Would you agree? Thank you!!
On-Page Optimization | | leslieevarts2 -
Hey guys so i changed my title on the website
The old one was very keyword stuffed and repeated words. see its now gone from search for those main keywords do you think its just playing now and it will be back ?
On-Page Optimization | | johan81 -
Onpage Optimisation Changes
Hi Guys, I love the SEO world I really do, but sometimes it can be quite confusing and even after 11 years and a few clients under my belt, I still have head-scratching days and this week has been one of them. It seem the rules surrounding onpage optimisation of keywords have changed quite a lot this year. Whilst, I understand blatantly sticking to a 3% keyword density rate for your keywords, hasn't been good practice for a while, and with RankBrain and machine learning, we have to pay attention to semantic words and phrases but it seems there is a new set of rules I haven't learnt yet. For example I had a client I was working on and we we noticed although they were ranking quite high for a keyword phrase, it wasn't actually mentioned in the text at all and so by adding it in a place it made sense, we should lift this and other keywords. Here is what happened, within a week their main keyword moved down from 1 to about 6 and the keyword that wasn't added moved from 4th to 23rd. After scratching my head and then going to full panic mode, I calmed down and looked at competitors, they didn't mention the word in the content either and so I decided to remove the one word we added to the text. The rankings came back overnight (well after doing a fetch as Google and getting to reindex). So if keyword density now is clearly NOT a metric to go on, how do we know the sweet spot? Do we use something like Ryte and make sure we using semantics and keywords within the average of the top ten? Does what Google deems important depend on the niche? Not a right or wrong answer here, just interested in your thoughts Regards Neil
On-Page Optimization | | nezona2 -
How shall be the permalinks fo Seo wordpress?
I just installed wp super cache plugin for wordpess, it´s asking me to edit the permalinks how shall they be to get a nice ranking and seo well done Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | emailfsoftware1 -
On Page Optimization not updating after SSL change
Last week we changed our URLs to be only HTTPS (they were a mixture of both for a couple of weeks). We did this by adding a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. However, the On Page Optimization is now showing the same URL/Keyword twice for a few of our pages. One has a grade A, one has a grade B. The grade B complains about "Rel Canonical" not matching, but the other doesn't. This is pretty confusing - should it not have crawled the pages and noticed the 301 redirects and combined the entries or removed the HTTP ones?
On-Page Optimization | | RitchieF19800 -
Changing Subfolder that has been crawled before
Question: I am using a wordpress multisite and I enabled the crawl options yesterday www.abc.com/subfolder <-original but i find that www.abc.com/sub is good enough I checked the site:abc.com but I find that my pages in the /subfolder has been crawled before. Can I just change it to www.abc.com/sub or it will raise duplicate content issue?
On-Page Optimization | | joony20080 -
SEO Site Planning Tool?
Does anyone know of a good SEO Site planning tool? I see that SEOBOOK has something that looked interesting but they want $300/mo! Thanks in advance! Andy
On-Page Optimization | | MaxOtto0 -
What changes have you made to see highest results?
What changes have you made to see highest results? such us rank increase etc
On-Page Optimization | | DiamondJewelryEmpire1