Rich Snippets appear differently for Wikipedia, Why?
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Keyword appearing on almost every slug of product pages = over-optimizatio
Hello all, I have an online store, let's say for example I sell forks of all kinds and colors. So naturally, I have 'product category' pages with titles and slugs like: Big forks
On-Page Optimization | | Veptune
Small forks
Plastic forks
Red fork
etc.. And plenty of product pages with slugs and H1 like: Small red fork
Large plastic fork
18th-century fork
etc... Some category pages are well-ranked, others are not, the same goes for product pages. The problem is that for the main keyword, 'fork' (exact query in the search console), my site is completely absent. Google should logically have referenced my homepage (which has links to all categories) for this main keyword. I have also optimized the page for it, without overdoing it. I wonder if it's not because I have a lot of pages with 'fork' in the slug, and perhaps Google thinks it's too much (even though it's logical for this word to be present in all product pages because it's an essential word to describe the product). I wonder if I should not modify half of my product pages to remove the word 'fork' from the slug...(only from the slug, without touching the H1 because removing the word 'fork' would remove its meaning). Do you have any experiences with this kind of issue? I wouldn't ask the question if my homepage was behind the competition, but it's completely absent. Thanks0 -
Branded keyword results meta description is different then long tail branded search term in SERP
Search "Venturize", the first result is Venturize with the
On-Page Optimization | | WWWade
description "Get help on finding the right loan for your small business
and learn what to look for when comparing your options." However, if you Google "Venturize opportunity finance network", the
first result is Venturize with the description "Playing:360p@30. Embed
size: CDN:fastly. Open link. Twitter · Facebook · About Venturize ·
Contact · About OFN · Mission-Driven Lenders: Locator Map." Why is Google not taking the meta description in the longer tail search? I have checked: All of google's indexed pages for the website- A 3rd party crawl of the website- Multiple other keyword combinations Nothing produced the same result or indicated a reason why "Venturize opportunity finance network" has the incorrect meta description in the SERP.any ideas?0 -
How do I get my sitelinks to appear
Hi I have recently launched a new site and I was hoping for destination sitelinks to appear under my site as they do for my competitors' sites. I have submitted a sitemap but is there anything else I can do to expedite this process or guarantee the sitelinks appearing? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | CosiCrawley0 -
Duplicate Content - What can be duplicate in two different product pages.
I am having a hard time understanding how my 3 different product pages are being shown up as Duplicate Content in s crawl. Some of my 21 different pages are being shown as duplicate content. Here are 3 of those: 1. http://champu.in/korn-rock-band-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india 2. http://champu.in/stop-the-burning-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india 3. http://champu.in/funny-t-shirts/absolut-punjabi-red-men-s-round-neck-t-shirt Can someone help me with this. Thanks in advance 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | sidjain4you0 -
Can't get authorship to show in the rich snippets tool...
Can't get authorship to show in the rich snippets tool... am I doing something wrong? spokanepaintingcontractor.org
On-Page Optimization | | Superflys0 -
How can I make google display rich snippets when searching for my domain?
My domain is www.phraseexpander.com If I search for phraseexpander in google, I'm in the first position (as it should be) but google is not giving extra space to my result as it happens, for example, if you search for "fogbugz". Is there any way I can hep google index my contents (I currently have a site index that is created by Yoast SEO). Thanks a lot. Andrea
On-Page Optimization | | nagar0 -
How to implement Rich snippets on dynamic pages?
I'm working on an e-commerce website, and I want to recommend to the client rich snippets, however only the main menu pages are the ones that have an actual static landing page, the rest are dynamic content pulled from a database. How can I implement rich snippets in this situation? or is it only applicable to static pages? Also when I optimized the title tags and meta description tags, the dynamic content is pulling these tags from the main categories, so Seomoz indicates there is a bunch of duplicate meta description tags and title tags. Any tips for this?
On-Page Optimization | | nrv0 -
Different pages for OS's vs 1 Page with Dynamic Content (user agent), what's the right approach?
We are creating a new homepage and the product are at different stages of development for different OS's. The value prop/messaging/some target keywords will be different for the various OS's for that reason. Question is, for SEO reasons, is it better to separate them into different pages or use 1 page and flip different content in based on the user agent?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeLin0