Structured micro data and rich snipets

A microformat (or microformat) allows you to format data in web pages, they streamline and standardize the content. It is a language that addresses search engines that uses them to better understand the content and sometimes uses them to enrich the snippets (the 4 lines of presentation in the results page). There are hundreds of them and they remain under-exploited.

The microformat reference is schema.org

In general, website owners tend to forget that Google does not guarantee the display of Rich Snippets in search results (SERPs), even if your markup is correct and validated by the engine’s official testing tool.

This means that this micro data will not be sure to highlight your results in the SERP.

Be aware, if you use the structured data testing tool, that the tool only checks the technical aspects such as:

• the validity of the markings,
• Syntax
• the fields, present and correctly filled in. And in particular the veracity of the contents of these fields

It does not really check for policy issues or guidelines.

If you want to see what your Rich Snippets look like, but they’re not (yet) visible in search results, you can perform a site search using the site operator in Chrome: Site:votre-site-web.com

And if, for example, they appear in this test search when you don’t see them in a natural result, it may be that there is a problem that you will solve by working on the quality of the page and overall on the quality of your site.

This is the best way to understand what works and the only way to acquire best practices for structured data.

The structured data you provide in your pages should never be wrong or misleading, it should always be an accurate representation of your actual content, it should really match the content of your offers and the content (texts, images, videos, audio files) you put online.

This is a fundamental principle to be respected.

To illustrate this, I have written a ” SEO recipe (with great care) and published it on the website of Tandem, a restaurant whose “recipe” micro-data comes out perfectly.

Actual recipe snipet, the photo appears but not the ingredients this time

While recipes benefit from a rich snippet that compete with “Ricardo” in the SERP, my imaginary SEO recipe doesn’t display either the image associated with the “dish” or any of the recipe’s ingredients. (panda, penguin, Panama sauce and many other good ingredients).

No rich data display for this humorous test article

… And this is because the page is not consistent with the implemented micro data and this article is misleading… (delinquent that I am!)

Check your markup with the Google tool

As mentioned above, you can essentially use the structured data testing tool to check the live validity of your markup for each sitemap URL you provide to the Google console.

Site owners sometimes forget that ” console ” provides essential information about both structured data and rich cards, (but this is relatively new).

If you learn something, by reading this article, I invite you to explore Google console (ex Webmaster tool) because it is a much richer tool.

Structured data in the console

If you go to your account (webmastertool) and have implemented structured data, you will find interesting reports about the problems or errors that googlebot has encountered in your rich cards.

An example of this is the latest data added on menus for micro-formats for restaurants.

When the update was carried out, the CMSs or webmasters had to recode the new fields because the previous ones appeared incomplete.

The marking of “products”

We are going to talk here, about the products you sell in your online store or the services you offer.

Avoid markup on category pages

For each product on a category page, avoid using product markup because a category is a generic page.

If you are thinking of tagging “product” your catalog of “holiday homes in St Pierre”, and you offer in the following directory a list of holiday homes in St Pierre, Google might be confused because you associate the product markup with a generic term present at the higher hierarchical level.

If you combine this data with review markup, there is a good chance that Google does not know what these reviews refer to.

Ratings and reviews

The same goes for aggregated reviews in general, ideally reviews should only refer to a specific article or service, and they should be assigned for each article individually. (in an E-commerce, the final product itself)

Again, this should not be a generic list or category of items, but rather specific reviews for each product or item.

This is one of the problems that still leaves webmasters stunned.

And the fact is, for Google, markup should never be confusing or misleading.

Reviews must be available on the site

If you use the reviews on your page and have integrated the appropriate markup, ideally, users should be able to see these reviews.

If you only have the markup on the page, and during their visit the user:

• has no way of seeing these reviews,
• no way to participate and
• that they cannot know the origin of the data,

Google may not display them because it all has to be clear to the user.

In short:

Your reviews should be coded in such a way that the user who visits your page can easily identify the reviews, add them, or check their origin.

It is simple and logical for a user to click on your stars to give a rating that should be added to the other votes and not remain neutral.

The “notice” markup must therefore be something real and not a function that is displayed but manipulated.

Source of aggregated reviews.

In yellow, the origin of the reviews, verifiable by a click

In general, sites that use third-party resource aggregations for their reviews are not a problem, but at the implementation you have to make sure that the source is mentioned, by putting a link to this source.

If a user sees this review from a third party, they should be able to click on an anchor or logo to be redirected to the third-party site where the reviews are featured.

If you do it this way, there will be no problem displaying them in search results.

This is what Google does when it displays reviews in the knowledge graph

Product and service markup

Another source of confusion concerns the marking of “products” (product or service, both are marked in the same way). Ideally, this should always refer to a specific product or service.

The specific item you offer on the product page should not be tagged with a very generic word, such as its brand (example: Toyota), or a word like “car” but rather name the item with its specific reference, “Toyota Yaris 3 III 1.5 Hybrid Dynamic 5p”

This error is common and is similar to spam, to be avoided completely.

Read more about micro-formats