Google Rich Snippets and Microdata in 2015

 

A Bit of Catchup

Rich snippets are elements of a web page that are recognized by search engine crawlers and are presented on the search engine result pages(SERPs). Search engine snippets require you to implement a small amount of code on your pages and will modify your results with the pertinent information that you tagged.

 

 

Benefits

In theory, by using rich snippets your SERP results will become more emphasized. They will stand out better against competitors that are not leveraging the same technologies.

 

According to the good people at Moz.com, and their somewhat dated visual guide to microdata companies have experienced 20-30% increase in click-through rates. This level of increase in traffic will have a significant bottom line impact that requires no extra investment in search advertising.

 

Successes

A good example of some of the most positive implementations of microdata are related to ratings and instructions. The below example displays the snippets that might influence a user's decision to buy a muffin. By showing a high rating, the amount of votes, the cook time, and the calorie count you can transfer the details of your product (in this case a muffin) into the SERP page.

 

Example:

 

Failures

Google authorship has been removed as of august 2014. While this was a huge hit to small and large content sites alike by removing incentive and exposure for writers. It is indicative of the shifting SEO landscape. It is common knowledge that Google modifies it’s algorithm 500 to 600 times a year between panda, penguin, and hummingbird updates, While losing authorship was a huge hit to some people - we can rest assured that it will not be the last feature to go the way of the dodo bird.

 

 

Commonly Presented Snippets

  • Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries

  • Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject

  • Event

  • Organization

  • Person

  • Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant ...

  • Product, Offer, AggregateOffer

  • Review, AggregateRating



 

Not so Different Implementations

There are three major different syntax’s that can be used to push information to the SERPs, microdata, RDFa, and RDFa lite. It was originally assumed that this would be standardized and reduced to one syntax. As time goes on it appears that Google and the World Wide Web Consortium are open to adding more and more unique languages to accomplish these goals.

 

Still Worth It!

If you have a large collection of content, you should consider which microformat you should use to best enhance your landing pages for your search visitor (which is most likely your primary source of traffic.) This is an obvious win for ecommerce sites but will have advantages for blogs and content sites as well.

 

If you would like to learn more about SEO, web analytics, or user experience as it regards to your website and Truvisibility you can learn more at http://www.truvisibility.com/en/blog. If you are interested in trying Truvisibility out today simply go to truvisibility.com and press the “Get Started” button, it is free and easy.