Generating Rich Snippets without Structured Data
-
I noticed something in Google search results today that I can't explain. Any help would be appreciated. I performed a real estate based search and the top result featured a rich snippet showcasing the following...
Address Price Bd/Ba
912 Garden District Dr #17. Charlotte, NC 28202 $179,990 3 / 2
222 S Caldwell St #1602. Charlotte, NC 28202 $389,238 2 / 2&1/2However, when I visit the page associated with this information, there is no Schema to be found. In fact, the page is, for the most part, just a large table listing homes on the market. The table headings are Address, Price, and Bd/Ba.
Is it common for Google to use table based data to generate rich snippets? What is the best way to influence this? In the absence of Schema (as the page we are talking about has no Schema implementation), does Google default to table data? Has anyone seen this behavior before and, if so, can you point me to it?
EDIT: I've now come across a few other examples where the information is not in a table, but rather in divs. Why are such sites (you can find some by searching for "[ZIPCODE] real estate") getting this treatment?
-
I believe Google constantly updates its algorithms "quietly" to detect structured data. While they have listed several schema markups you can use now (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en), they are always finding new ways to detect them naturally (e.g. table/lists HTML tags in this case), without explicitly informing the users.
The best way forward is to format your site's data in the most semantic way possible, which will likely increase your chances of Google picking them up when they update their structured data detection algorithms.
Just my two cents
-
I've had it happen to me too, with a site that uses tables for data. A search for site:strikemodels.com/products will show a few examples. I haven't done anything to encourage these results.
-
Yes. Google will use formatted data even when there are not Rich Snippets. They will also pull from Lists. See this articles here: http://moz.com/blog/how-do-i-get-googles-bulleted-snippets
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
-
Mapping ALL search data for a broad topic
Hi All As our company becomes a bigger and bigger entity I'm trying to figure out how I can create more autonomy. One of the key areas that needs fixing is briefing the writers on articles based on keywords. We're not just trying to go after the low hanging fruit or the big money keywords but actually comprehensively cover every topic and provide actual good quality up to date info (surprisingly rare in a competitive niche) and eventually cover pretty much every topic there is. We generally work on a 3 tier system on a folder level, topics and then sub-topics. The challenge is getting an agency to: a) be able to pull all of the data without being knowledgeable in our specific industry. We're specialists and, thus, target people that need specialist expertise as well as more mainstream stuff (the stuff that run of the mill people wouldn't know about). b) know where it all fits topically as we kind of organise the content on a heirarchy basis. And we generally cover multiple smaller topics within articles. Am I asking for the impossible here? It's the one area of the business I feel the most nervous about creating autonomy with. Can we become be as extensive and comprehensive as a wiki-type website without having somebody within the business that knows it providing the keyword research. I did a searh for all data using the main two seed keywords for this subject on ahrefs and it came up with 168000 lines of spreadsheet data. Obviously this went way beyond the maximum I was allowed to export. Interested in feedback and, if any agencies are up for the challenge, do let me know! I've been using moz pro for a long time but have never posted and apologise if what I'm describing is being explained badly here. Requirements Keywords to cover all (broad niche) related queries in the UK, no relevant uk (broad niche) keywords will be missed Organised in a way that can be interpreted as article brief and folder structure instructions. Questions How would you ensure you cover every single keyword? Assuming no specialist X knowledge, how will you be able to map content and know which search queries belong in which topics and in what order. Also (where there is keyword leakage from other regions) how will you know which are UK terms and which aren’t? With minimal X knowledge – how will you know whether you’ve missed an opportunity or not (what you don’t know you don’t know) What specific resources will you require from us in order for this to work? What format will the data be provided to us in - how will you present the finished work so that it can be turned into article briefs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | d.bird0 -
Website Structured data in Google
Can anyone help me to show website structure data in Google when someone search my website in Google. I already added my website in Google and Google webmaster tool. Thanks in adv.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | talkinnetventure0 -
Robots.txt, does it need preceding directory structure?
Do you need the entire preceding path in robots.txt for it to match? e.g: I know if i add Disallow: /fish to robots.txt it will block /fish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Milian
/fish.html
/fish/salmon.html
/fishheads
/fishheads/yummy.html
/fish.php?id=anything But would it block?: en/fish
en/fish.html
en/fish/salmon.html
en/fishheads
en/fishheads/yummy.html
**en/fish.php?id=anything (taken from Robots.txt Specifications)** I'm hoping it actually wont match, that way writing this particular robots.txt will be much easier! As basically I'm wanting to block many URL that have BTS- in such as: http://www.example.com/BTS-something
http://www.example.com/BTS-somethingelse
http://www.example.com/BTS-thingybob But have other pages that I do not want blocked, in subfolders that also have BTS- in, such as: http://www.example.com/somesubfolder/BTS-thingy
http://www.example.com/anothersubfolder/BTS-otherthingy Thanks for listening0 -
Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.
I read about some recommendations to noindex the URL of the site search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Checked in analytics that site search URL generated about 4% of my total organic search traffic (<2% of sales). My reasoning is that site search may generate duplicated content issues and may prevent the more relevant product or category pages from showing up instead. Would you noindex this page or not? Any thoughts?0 -
Google Generating its Own Page Titles
Hi There I have a question regarding Google generating its own page titles for some of the pages on my website. I know that Google sometimes takes your H1 tag and uses it as a page title, however, can anyone tell me how I can stop this from happening? Is there a meta tag I can use, for example like the NOODP tag? Or do I have to change my page title? Thanks Sadie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape0 -
Does anyone have any experience using GoodRelations Snippet Generator for E-Commerce versus markup from Schema.org?
I am trying to implement Structured Data markup on a large e-commerce site that has ancient code and is not on any standard e-commerce platform. It is a Webstore we self-host that was developed for us and heavily customized. What's worse is that I don't have access to the source code. I have to somehow instruct our IT Director how and where to place everything. So I'm going to need to be meticulously specific. As I began wading through our code and determining where to insert code as instructed by Schema.org I ran across this on one of their pages: "This class contains derivatives of properties from the GoodRelations Vocabulary for E-Commerce, created by Martin Hepp. GoodRelations is a data model for sharing e-commerce data on the Web that can be expressed in a variety of syntaxes, including RDFa and HTML5 Microdata. More information about GoodRelations can be found at http://purl.org/goodrelations/." I went to check it out and it appears that this could be a great resource as it has a snippet generator and several "cookbooks" for adding micro data to our site. Here's a link to their snippet generator: http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/grsnippetgen/ However, with a catalog of 5,000 SKUs, needless to say we aren't going to plug in our products into this generator one-by one. Has anyone here successfully used GoodRelations to help them implement micro data into a large E-commerce site that isn't a standard platform (not Magento, WP, Joomla or Volusion) ?? I would be very greatful to anyone who can share their experiences and or make suggestions on how we might best proceed. Thanks! Dana
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Rich Snippets Publisher errors
Hi all. Happen to do a bit of testing with some of our microformat and microdata markup when I noticed our linked Google+ Publisher markup has stopped working. It definitely was working, and nothings changed, but now we are flagging errors, and I've noticed some of our competitors also have the same problem. publisher linked Google+ page = https://plus.google.com/103929635387487847550
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sjr4x4
Error: This page does not include verified publisher markup. Learn more. If I actually add a duplicate rel="publisher" then I get the following results: Extracted Author/Publisher for this page publisherlinked Google+ page = https://plus.google.com/103929635387487847550
Error: This page does not include verified publisher markup. Learn more. publisherlinked Google+ page = https://plus.google.com/103929635387487847550/ The second line doesn't seem to flag an error? I know this is still all pretty new, so is anyone else having problems or odd results, or is Google having some problems? All our other rich snippets such as reviews etc are working fine, just seems to be the publisher bit. cheers Steve0 -
Ranking for our member's company names without giving them all away!
Hi, We have a directory of 25,000 odd companies who use our site. We have a strong PR site and want to rank a page for each company name. Some initial testing on one or two company names brings us to #2 after the company's own web site in the format: "Company Name Reviews and Feedback" - so it works well. We want to do this for all 25,000 of our members, however we do not wish to make it easy for our competitors to scrape through our member database!! e.g. using: www.ourdomain.com/randomstring/company-name-(profile).php unfortunately with the above performing a search on google for site:domain.com/()/()(profile).php would bring up all records. Are there any tried and tested ways of achieving what we're after here? Many Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0