If you type in "Boyce Avenue" on Google, it shows a rich snippet of their upcoming events which I'm assuming is using Event Information. However, if you type in "boyceavenue.com/tour.html" in Google's rich snippet tool, nothing shows up. Why does this happen?
I have answered this here in your other question.
Google and other search engines are using various data sources for generating Rich Snippets and similar functions. Rich meta-data crawled from the pages, be it RDFa, microdata, or microformats, is only ONE (yet important) source.
Google seems to have bilateral agreements with -- typically large -- sites for consuming their structured data directly. This why you may see rich snippets on pages that have no data markup in the HTML.
Google Fusion Tables (http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home/) may also become a technique for exposing structured data to Google.
However, in general, using schema.org or http://purl.org/goodrelations/ (for ecommerce) markup in RDFa or microdata syntax is IMO the best option for new sites,
because the data will be accessible to search engines and browser extensions alike and
because the data will also send relevance signals to search engines (see http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/GoodRelations_for_Semantic_SEO for more details.
Best wishes
Martin Hepp
Related
I haven't found a clear and updated answer, even after googling for a few hours, so here it goes:
I am aware of the advantages and disadvantages of both Microdata and JSON-LD. I also know that Microdata was dropped from W3C (and consequently from the browsers' API). What I'm not sure about is that how it will affect any site where Microdata is used specifically for SEO purpose.
Does Google support JSON-LD for SERPs? What format does it recommend to use? I am looking for updated answers - not from 2011 or 2012 (if they are still applicable though, feel free to post it).
What is more appropriate for a dynamic site with lots of contents (think: 50000 videos, images etc): JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa? Why?
Consumers that support Microdata support Microdata, no matter if or where Microdata is specified.
It’s conceivable that new consumers might decide not to support it, but the syntax is still very popular and still part of WHATWG’s HTML Living Standard, so it’s probably not going to vanish.
About the consumer Google
Some years ago, JSON-LD was not supported for many of their features, and they recommended that authors use Microdata (and they supported RDFa, too). Today it’s different.
See Google’s Markup formats and placement:
JSON-LD is the recommended format. Google is in the process of adding JSON-LD support for all markup-powered features. The table below lists the exceptions to this. We recommend using JSON-LD where possible.
According to the mentioned table, Microdata and RDFa support all of Google’s data types, while JSON-LD supports everything except their Breadcrumbs feature.
I wouldn’t give much weight to their recommendation. They say that "Structured data markup is most easily represented in JSON-LD format", but I think it’s safe to say that this only applies to authors that generate the structured data programmatically (especially from tools that support JSON).
For authors that manually add the structured data markup, it’s typically easier to use Microdata or RDFa, and using these syntaxes minimizes the risk that an author updates the content without updating the structured data, too (see DRY principle).
JSON-LD vs. Microdata vs. RDFa
Unless you know (and care for) consumers that don’t support all three syntaxes, it doesn’t matter. Use what is easier for you and your tools.
If you have no preference, I would say JSON-LD or RDFa, because contrary to Microdata,
both are W3C Recommendations,
both can be used in non-HTML5 contexts,
both allow to (easily) mix several vocabularies.
JSON-LD if you like your structured data not "intermingled" with your markup (= duplicating the content), RDFa if you like to use your existing markup (= not duplicating the content).
I've opted to go for JSON-LD because it is easier to read and compile. Spotting errors is easy for more complicated dictionaries. It is the W3C and Google recommended standard.
One caveat (major if you need to support it), is that as of May 16 2017, Bing STILL doesn't support JSON-LD
Google's Understand how structured data works now says:
Google recommends using JSON-LD for structured data whenever possible.
It seems reasonable to me to still mix in microdata to avoid duplication of long content, such as articleBody, but generally the industry is JSON-LD all the way.
I discovered that JSON-LD does support breadcrumbs. I applied breadcrumbs using the latest version of Yoast on my wordpress site, and it passed muster with google search console in the rich results test of the live page as well as a crawl of the live page after submitting the sitemap.
It should be noted that Google had deprecated the use of data-vocabulary.org. It wants schema.org.
microdata easy to use with angular 8+
but you can do the same thing with json-ld.
Humanly, you can read attributs easiest with json-ld but there is no big difference between both. Just use what you know how to do to win time
We've implemented rich snippets for a product type, as well as rich snippets for the organization type.
Both types have their attributes passed into a JSON+LD type script wrapper.
Please see the markup and validation here: Structured Data Testing Tool
Google picks up the organization type and this is verifiable because we've actually changed the logo on our organization card.
However, Google has not picked up any of the rich snippets attributes for our products.
Note Both the product snippet and organization snippet validate perfectly, without any errors or warnings on the Structured Data Testing Tool. I do not think this is an issue with markup unless there is something instrinsically wrong with JSON+LD formatted rich snippets (as opposed to the inline markup variety)
Additional Note These JSON+LDs have been printed inside all of our product pages (30,000+) for well over 3 months now, with no change. This is most likely not an issue of time to propagate.
Further Note We are a very heavily trafficked website that Google shows respect to in search results. So I do not think that obscurity is the cause.
So, my question is: What are some possible reasons the above linked JSON+LD markup is failing? Is it possible that Google is intentionally ignoring it? What are some potential solutions to solving this issue?
Update 2016: The documentation got updated and it no longer contains the note. So now JSON-LD seems to be supported for the Products Rich Snippet.
In Google’s Products Rich Snippet documentation, it is noted for single product pages that the JSON-LD syntax is not yet fully supported:
We are in the process of implementing JSON-LD support for this Rich Snippet type. At the current time, we recommend using microdata or RDFa.
This might explain why it’s (currently) not working.
(Apparently this note was added a few weeks ago.)
According to google's Structured Data Testing Tool, there are no errors in my review schema code, but the stars still are not displaying in the preview. Does anyone have any idea why? I thought maybe it was a nesting issue, but I tried to organize the data in all kinds of arrangements and to no avail. Any thoughts would be very appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
Here's the page I'm referring to:
http://www.junkluggers.com/locations/westchester-ny/white-plains-ny-junk-removal-and-furniture-pickup/
(The review I'm working on is the one at the bottom of the page, not the testimonial on the right sidebar.)
According to Google:
" If you've added structured data for rich snippets, but they are not appearing in search results, the problem can be caused by two types of issues:
Technical issues with the structured data markup or with the Google’s ability to crawl, index, and utilize the structured data.
Quality issues, that is, structured data that is technically correct, but does not adhere to Google’s quality guidelines."
Full answer here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1093493?hl=en
Along with RustyFluff's comment, I do notice a few technical errors in your markup, Catherine. In a nutshell, you haven't defined who or what is being reviewed, and you should be using the reviewBody property instead of description. You also should remove the city from within the author's name markup. And something else that I should point out is that you should remove the authorship markup from the page, as it's not appropriate for an authorship tag according to Google's guidelines. Also, the publisher tag only needs to go on your homepage, and it should link to your Google+ business page, not to a personal profile.
Keep in mind, though, that even if your markup is technically perfect, there are no guarantees that Google will display your rich snippets. They determine that based on, among other things, various quality signals.
What will happen if Microdata and RDFa both are on a webpage?
What I can tell from my experience from a class of web pages where I have implemented Microdata where RDFa contents was already there is that Google possibly does not read Microdata. I see one element down the hierarchy is not correct according to Rich Snippet tool but still many things Google can read according to that tool.
Want to know the exact reason, why Google has not taken those Microdata into search result?
The Rich Snippet tool view of my page is here.
Nothing special will happen. However, as you observed, there may be parties that only read one format (and others read only the other format, or both, or neither). I think the processors of RDFa and microdata will (eventually) all read all formats, so it shouldn't matter which you pick.
The help page says
You can use microformats, microdata, or RDFa to mark up your content. However, you should pick one markup standard and use it consistently across the page.
This suggests you should pick one, but no exact reason is given. I can't give an exact reason, because I don't work for Google.
I'm having trouble getting the Webmaster Tools rich snippet testing tool to properly return markup for schema.org's WebPageElement types.
http://schema.org/WebPageElement
Does anyone have a site that hosts this markup?
I'm looking for solutions for a website that has undesirable snippets returned on Google search. The website is an interactive library of slide presentations, with an advanced search function.
Many different search pages on this site are being dropped from the Google index every week. The snippet returned on these pages includes the navigation menu. There is no h1 tag and the first line of the navigation menu is in bold, so Google is identifying the menu as the main content of the page and returning this info in the search results.
I need Google to put the actual page content in the search results, to increase click through rate and resolve a probable duplicate content issue.
I thought it would be good to put an h1 tag on the site, and add schema for WebPageElement, SiteNavigationElement, WPHeader, WPFooter, and WebPage.
Does anyone have examples of this markup on their site?
In the past I've used the rich snippet tool and had it return error, and in every instance I found that my code did indeed contain an error, so I don't think it's the tool.
I have implemented several of the schema.org WebPageElement types in http://gamesforkidsfree.net/en/ including siteNavigationElement
You can check how it is being recognized by Google in Rich Snippets Testing Tool.
Also in Google Webmaster Tools, there is a section to check this kind of markup at "Optimization / Structured Data", for this case it shows:
Type Schema Items # Pages
---------------------------------------------------------
ItemPage schema.org 109,657 6,866
WPAdBlock schema.org 20,727 6,973
SiteNavigationElement schema.org 7,350 7,322
WPHeader schema.org 7,319 7,319
WPFooter schema.org 7,319 7,319
WebPage schema.org 649 649
Regarding duplicate content you can have a look at one of the many Google support pages about canonicalization (isn't that duplicate content? :) e.g. canonicalization -> hints.
It would be easier to answer if you could show the actual website or a SERP screenshot. By the way I don't think that your problem can be solved using that kind of markup since there is no evidence that Google supports it even if Schema.org is a Google initiative.
For what I understand you have two different kind of issues:
Bad search snippets. Google shows in the search snippet a fragment of the on page text that is relevant to the user query. So what you see on the search snippet largely depends on the query you typed in the search box. If you see a piece of the navigation menu in the snippets it could be that there is no relevant text in the indexed page so Google does not have anything better to show than the text in the navigation menu
Search pages being dropped from the Google index. This is a different, and more serious, problem. Are those "search pages" a good and relevant result compared to the other pages ranking for the query you are typing? Is the main topic of the page clear and explicit (remember that sometimes you nee to spoon-feed the search engines)? I'm giving you more questions than answers but, as I stated before, is not easy to diagnose a SEO problem without seeing the web site.
All the above being said, google does show in its SERP when you define BREADCRUMP and schema.org as a whole is being made by the search engine giants so implementing it ensures some level of better understanding of the bots about your page. Search engines do not tell you everything they do but if you follow the main standards they produce together you pretty much ensure yourself good content availability within the SERPs.
You shouldn't count much on the impact from that though.
I suggest you focus mainly on pretty urls, canonical usage, title, description and proper implementation of schema.org itemprop for your main content type on the inner pages as well as H1 for your title.
Also try to render your main content as high as possible within the html and avoid splitting your title, summary and image… best case scenario they should be close to each other with H1, IMG and P elements and not be divided by divs, tables and so on.
You can have a look at this site http://svejo.net/1792774-protsesat-na-tsifrovizatsiya-v-balgariya-zapochva
It has a pretty good SEO on its article pages and shows up quite nicely and often in SERPs because of its on-page SEO.
I hope this helps you.