Update 8 december 2011: The good: We have our rich snippets back! The bad: we switched back to Microformats about 10 days ago… That’s not to say that Schema.org / Microdata won’t work, or that our switching back caused the snippets to return, since this blog post might have also helped in getting attention to our case.
What we do believe is that Google’s implementation of Microdata is not 100% bulletproof yet, especially outside of Google.com (on regional Google sites like Google.nl). My advice to be safe: test Microdata on some page on your site first, before you switch everything…
We used to have those nice “rich snippets” on our site for our course pages that have reviews. For a comparison site (like Tripadvisor or Easytobook) they’re very important to signal to users that there’s more than “just” the massive amount of hotels, or courses in our case.
With our rebranding from Eduhub to Springest in July, we lost our rich snippets because we’re on a different domain and they are manually whitelisted by Google. Of course we redirected each page from the old to the new domain, and we added support for the new and improved Microdata, instead of using Microformats like we did before… Well, seems to have been a bad idea! Google recommended this in the launch on their official blog. And on their help page about rich snippets, Schema.org is linked as the source to add rich snippets via microdata to your site. And on the Google FAQ about Schema.org the question is answered unambiguously:
Historically, we’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. Instead of having webmasters decide between competing formats, we’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org. In addition, a single format will improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. There are arguments to be made for preferring any of the existing standards, but we’ve found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats, so this is the format that we’ve gone with.
So who were we to doubt that this would work?
Well, a sign should have been that Google’s own “Rich Snippet Testing Tool” did not support the new Microdata format. As stated in the same FAQ:
Why doesn’t the rich snippets testing tool show a preview of my search result snippet?
Currently, you can use the testing tool to see what information Google can extract from your pages. We’re working on updating the tool so you can see how content marked up with schema.org might appear in search results.
We thought we were just a bit ahead of the pack and Google would fix the tool quickly. Last week, it suddenly seemed to start showing rich snippets for our Microdata markupped pages, but what was shown was incomplete. Only the number of reviews was shown, not the actual score.
So we will now switch back to Microformats…
Then we started to search for implementations of Microdata that had rich snippets. And we asked others to search with us. But we could find none, and all the rich snippets in SERP’s we saw were still using Microformats… So after two months of waiting for Google to re-enable our rich snippets, we decided to switch back to Microformats to make sure we at least have a chance to be included again.
Any sightings of Microdata in the wild?
If you have any suggestions (other then submitting the rich snippet form) for getting our snippets back, let us know! And if you know examples of sites actually using Schema.org’s Microdata markup that has rich snippets in Google, show them in the comments!
You should’ve asked someone who knows
it’s all about being whitelisted, nothing else.
Well, do you have an example then Joost?
It’s quite hypocrite from Google. I’ve the same experience, after checking with the Snippets testing tool, I immediately changed to code back to the original markup.
Yes, Joost is 100% spot on. You have to be whitelisted. The new re-branded site has not been whitelisted.
Are old microformats and shema.org’s microdata mutually exlusive ? I am planning to implement semantic markup on a client’s website and I was thinking using microformat for legacy compatibility and microdata for the future. Thoughts ?
Mike: same question to you then: do you have an example of a site using Microdata that has rich snippets for reviews?
I know a site has to be whitelisted manually (as we were and lost it when we rebranded of course), but you also need a working metdata markup, which I’m still not sure Microdata offers…
And: how do we know the new site is not whitelisted yet?
Hi Gabriel, the official story seems to be that they’re both supported at the moment, but that microdata is the future. This is mainly because it support much more content types, you can read all about it at the URL’s I linked to in the post…
Example sites using schema.org markup -
1. tv series – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Ftitle%2Ftt0813715%2F&view=
2. product- http://www.ebay.com/ctg/Logitech-Revue-/97019743
3. movie – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inception/
4. Music – http://www.myspace.com/awilolongombaofficiel/music/playlists/awilo-longomba-officiel-s-playlist-243959?_escaped_fragment_=
5. events – http://www.ticketmaster.com/Foo-Fighters-tickets/artist/776005?_escaped_fragment_=
6. recipe – http://www.isaveurs.com/recette/recette_tarte_tatin.php
you can test all of these at – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
and also see these urls on google.com
Thanks
-Pravir
There are actually very few large sites using Schema.org at the moment. With both Bing and Google working together on schema.org, it is the only way to go moving forward. I myself, would not spend the time to implement anything other than schema.org. Schema.org offers everything that any of the other microformats offered.
And unfortunately I do not have any specific examples of review sites using schema.org markup. At the moment, I do not have a reason to spend any time paying attention to that niche of sites.
Good luck on getting whitelisted! I’m pretty confident that is your only problem.
Thanks Mike, we were pretty confident too (I mean, it’s the only thing that makes sense). We’re just getting nervous that it’s taking so long, after all you’d think Google could check the site after it’s been redirected in less than 2 months…
The only thing we can control about this is to follow the big guys (and our own fine implementation before the rebranding), since we have proof that microformats are supported by Google correctly.
Thanks a lot for your examples Pravir! However, I still don’t see a solid implementation of the review (aggregaterating) Microdata in snippets, maybe I’m interpreting things wrong?
The eBay example gives this preview in the rich snippet tool: https://img.skitch.com/20110926-qspaxgwnk4h8d3h5i668n9mytb.png. As I’ve written in the blogpost, only the number of reviews is displayed and not the rating itself or the price or anything else that is in the microdata.
If you look at this page in Google.nl it looks even worse: https://skitch.com/rubzie/fhduy/www.ebay.com-ctg-logitech-revue-97019743-google-zoeken. (here’s the SERP) As you see, only one review is recognized and the reviewer is shown in the SERP. So the aggregaterating is ignored, together with all the other 37 reviews in the microdata, it seems?
I checked it at Google.com to be sure, and there it at least looks like the preview: https://img.skitch.com/20110926-8h1enakmr77pdcabcxyup1pa9y.png So apparently at .com it does work, partly, as the preview tool suggests.
So is it safe to conclude that it’s not working as one would expect? (i.e. displaying the same data as sites markupped with Microformats)
I’m sorry for being so detailed about it but we’re just stressed because we hope to get our snippets back and want to make sure we’re not doing anything wrong
This all still feels like going with Schema.org’s recommendations was a bad idea, although we of course would like to support the standards as proposed…
Let me try and answer each question -
1. The ebay example (https://img.skitch.com/20110926-qspaxgwnk4h8d3h5i668n9mytb.png.) does not show price currently because its marked up wrong. The price should be inside the “offer”. Product does not have a property named price – http://schema.org/Product
Take a look at this product example which works -
a) http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsites.google.com%2Fsite%2Fpravirgupta%2Fschema_product2.html%3Fattredirects%3D0%26d%3D1&view=
b) http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsites.google.com%2Fsite%2Fpravirgupta%2Fschema_review.html%3Fattredirects%3D0%26d%3D1&view=
The testing tool could do a better job of reporting that the field inside product does not belong there.
2. The google.nl discrepancy is something we will look into. I dont think its an issue on webmaster side or on markup. You will currently have the same issue irrespective of which format you marked up the data.
It should be working on google.com.
Thanks again Pravir. I saw indeed that aggregaterating > ratingvalue works for Movie, but it doesn’t seem to work for Product, does it? Ebay might have implemented it wrong, but in your examples the aggregate rating is also not shown (only the number of reviews and the price) and we cannot get it to work in tests either.
The discrepancy in google.nl and .com is also not a great motivation to stay with microdata, since I do see many examples of sites with microformats that have snippets. And we depend largely on .nl and other local variants of Google
Hi Guys,
Are there more comments on this issue since this post is/was 2 months ago?
I’ve noticed Springest got their rich snippets back and i’ve read an article emerce about Independer getting rich snippets on the quiry “Autoverzekering”.
We’re about to implement schema.org for our Dutch website.. Would be a serious laugh if Google still forces us to use the old format..
Yup, we got our snippets back, but only after we changed everything back to hReview. Our recommendation for now is not to use schema.org.
Damn… what a load of BS.
Google needs to fix this.. we just spent a shitload on schema.org implementation for adresses, reviews and events.
About 3 months ago we have added rich snippets from schema.org. we are running a webshop where people can review our products. About 8 days ago our product reviews are visible in Google organic results. We are very happy with this result. Why google has accepted us? I have no idea. Our webshop is just one year old and the domain also.
Which site is that Erwin, always good to have examples
Thanks!
This is the website bedelsieraad.nl, you can see the result when you search in Google for all the pages that are indexed. I am very happy with this result, never though we would we accepted for this. Normally you see this only from websites like Trustpilot in the results, but these are reviews that our customers post on our website.
Great, you make me happy Erwin
So, does anyone have any info about how to get whitelisted, or do you just have to sit around and wait for Google to select your site?
This whitelisting process is very frustrating. Some people with very new sites get whitelisted in days, others who have traded for years do not get included. Oe of the main issues is to use a review site that has already been whitelisted, e.g. Reevoo or FeeFo.com etc. These companies pay Google to be whitelisted, so I understand, and thus reviews with links to those domains get into SERPs quickly.
If you are doing standalone reviews from your own customers, the process seems a lot harder. Some have achieved this quickly, see above, which is very annoying for long trading companies who still cannot get the SERPs to include their microformat information. Google have a page to allow you to tell them about your microformatting, and you provide a minimum of four links that hae been validated with thr rich text snippets tool for your website. Give that a try.
Same old thing with Google – luck of the draw who gets whitelisted!
Great post and comments!
Erwin, are you no longer using the schema.org microformat ? results look great but site seems to be using data-vocabulary.org
Rubin, like you I’m about to roll out some updates and currently deciding whether to swtich from the data-vocabulary.org to the schema.org format. My site seems to be white listed with some products displayed using rich snippets but not all hence the possible updates.
Interestingly looking at your example above searching for Linda Hotel the results for booking uses the hreview format and the hotels.nl is using the schema.org format to good effect.
One thing I have noticed when testing using the rich snippets testing tool is that it’s imperative that you use the correct markup and nesting or it fails. Something Pravir with the ebay example.
Thanks Darren.
I think it’s sort of widely accepted that whitelisting has been turned off: all sites get review snippets (there’s still white listing for other snippets) now
About hotels.nl using schema.org: I guess you’re using Google.com and not .co.uk or certainly not .nl?
Because here on .nl their snippets are not visible:
https://img.skitch.com/20120217-qayfgcc2h7twpu5hetwu4ix96t.png
Curious to see what you see!
schema.org is something which gives lots of things to experiment. I would love to start working on it. I was doing my research and found that some of the top sites including ebay have used the terms explained in schema.org. so I believe that they already have done lots of research before integrating it on there big portal with millions of visitors. I men no one want to try things with such a big portal without any research , so I think small websites can also try looking at it, please share your experiments and results here.
Thanks
Dhanesh Mane
Here is a counterexample to Pravir’s point.
Google correctly reads out the metadata objects as shown at the bottom of the page, but where it shows the snippet as it would be displayed on its search results, the metadata is missing and it claims not to have any.
Boo hiss.
anyone can help me, i found this :
Warning: Page contains property “aiablogid” which is not part of the schema
thank you
I was wondering: What is the point having rich snippet for a hotel website that does not have reviews for its hotels (or iframed reviews)? I understand that if you don’t have any reviews for your hotel database you cannot use hreview.. then you should probably upload hcard to all your hotel page.. but why for?
rich snippet helped me a lot , thanks for this amazing content. I believe every single blog should integrate them. thanks.
ALex.