Rich Snippets appear differently for Wikipedia, Why?

[Jon-S]

Hi All,

I've been doing a bit of research for a customer and whilst I was looking through the google results pages I came across this interesting rich snippet for a Wikipedia page (see screen shot attached). Its returned some extra information i.e Owner, Water Source, Number of Stills and Capacity.

Is this just Google playing around or is this something I've missed and you can markup additional information for your rich snippet?

Thanks in advance

Jon

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[StephanSolomonidis]

Hi Jon,

The information showing up in the rich snippet has been taken from the very well-structured table that appears on the right-hand side of many Wikipedia pages. This data is very easy for Googlebot to read (because it's in a table), and regarded as trustworthy (because it's on Wikipedia). Depending on how Google interprets your intent, it may or may not borrow from this well-structured data in the rich snippet.

For example, on the Wikipedia page for Optical Express, there is again a table that lists key data about the company: the year it was founded, who the founder was, and which products it sells, among other things. When I search for "optical express contact lenses", the Wikipedia entry doesn't have a rich snippet, even though contact lenses are listed in the product field in the table. If I search for a less commercially-minded term, like "optical express founder", I do get a rich snippet with information about the company and founder (see the two images I've attached here).

So the point really is that there are no guarantees, and no direct control over the rich snippet, but you and your clients should definitely expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing in future, whenever Google is confident that a rich snippet provides a good answer.

As for what you can do: your client won't have Wikipedia's authority, but you can use structured data, such as JSON-LD or Microformats, to make the meaning of your words more transparent to Google. This will increase the chance, at least, of meaningful rich snippets with information about your client's company or products. Tymen has linked to a couple of useful resources, which you should use to ensure that you're implementing the structured data correctly.

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[Tymen]

Hi Jon,

Google allows several forms of structured Data which you can find on https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/. I just have the Reviews in place and this works very well for me. There's a handy tool to see if you meet Googles regulations on https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

With Wikipedia's example I indeed think google is playing around. If your client is ont the Whiskey business aswell I would suggest you enrich the Wikipedia page for them :).

Good luck!

Tymen

[GlobeRunner]

What I believe you're seeing is information taken from the knowledge graph. Wikipedia is a data source of the knowledge graph (there are a lot of sources), so it's logical that Google would include that information in their results.