Why does Google recommend schema for local business/ organizations?
-
Why does Google recommend schema for local business/ organizations? The reason I ask is I was in Structed Data Testing Tool, and I was running some businesses and organizations through it. Yet every time, it says this "information will not appear as a rich snippet in search results, because it seems to describe an organization. Google does not currently display organization information in rich snippets".
Additionally, many of times when you do search the restaurant or a related query it will still show telephone number and reviews and location. Would it be better to list it as a place, since I want to have its reviews and location show up thanks?
I would be interested to hear what everyone else opinions are on this thanks.
-
Okay thank you so much Miriam!
-
Hi Peter,
Thank so much for the live example. I totally get what you mean now. Okay, so the example you are showing is from TripAdvisor, and yes, Google consistently displays stars and review counts, etc., for TripAdvisor-based results, and for other large sites like Yelp. I presume (but am not certain) that these are rich snippets. Here are 2 articles from Google on this subject:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146645
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/richsnippetslocal/
In mid-2012, Google stopped showing stars on their own results after switching to Zagat as their provider. See:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/06/12/google-we-can-show-stars-if-we-want-to/
The most public test case of rich snippets appearing for a small local business was Mike Blumenthal's writeup of getting stars and other data to appear for a jeweler client of his. However, this data then disappeared, only to reappear sporadically some months later. Read this:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/08/09/are-rich-snippet-reviews-making-a-limited-comeback-in-local/
So, sometimes Google will still display this type of data for small businesses alongside their organic results, but it is sporadic. Looking at that same client of Mike's today, I don't see any stars, but who knows, they could come back again tomorrow. Mike's opinion is that is still makes sense to mark up pages, and his advice is trustworthy.
And, of course, you do have the option of listing your local business on entities that consistently do show stars (like Yelp).
Hope this helps, and thanks again for the screenshot!
-
http://cdnext.seomoz.org/1347566301_84f5cacc41479945c65eea948eb9a2d8.jpg
Here is the link its the first result.
-
I want something like this, so basically if someone searches Car Dealer. That this would appear after the Local Search results. Is this possible for a local business, After the local search results? Or, is it only possible in the local search results not the purely just organic results? I hope that solves it thanks.
Sorry for the text formatting, it won't let me change it.
-
Hi Peter,
Can you find a live example of a business that is achieving what you're hoping to achieve and share it with me? I want to be sure I understand, and without seeing an example, I'm not clear on how best to advise you. Thanks!
-
Hi Miriam, sorry for the confusion. So, do you not think it would be beneficial to have schema for the properties of a place, as it would allow me to show the business reviews rating/ aggregate rating in the search? Basically I want it so when someone searches something relating to a car dealer. That if Google chooses to show my URL then it will be accompanied by the business reviews rating/ aggregate rating in the search. I feel it would help to increase the CTR. I hope that makes sense.
-
Hi Peter, I'm not sure I understand your question. You write: "Many of times when you do search the restaurant or a related query it will still show telephone number and reviews and location. " Do you mean when you search for the restaurant, you are seeing the local pack of results (meaning accompanied by the grey pin and link to the Google+ Local page)? If so, that has nothing to do with Schema. The local listings stem from Google Places/Google+ Local, not from whatever schema you've embedded in a website. I use schema for my local business clients and understand the point of it to be to strengthen the geographic signals the website is sending to Google regarding the client's NAP (name, address, phone number). The goal is not to have that info show up in the SERPs (unlike rel=author or something like that). Does this answer your question? If not, please provide further detail.
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
-
Whitehat site suffering from drastic & negative Keyword/Phrase Shifts out of the blue!
I am the developer for a fairly active website in the education sector that offers around 30 courses and has quite an actively published blog a few times a week and social profiles. The blog doesn't have comments enabled and the type of visitor that visits is usually looking for lessons or a course. Over the past year we have had an active input in terms of development to keep the site up to date, fast and following modern best practises. IE SSL certificates, quality content, relevant and high powered backlinks ect... Around a month ago we got hit by quite a large drop in our ranked keywords / phrases which shocked us somewhat.. we attributed it to googles algorithm change dirtying the waters as it did settle up a couple of weeks later. However this week we have been smashed again by another large change dropping almost 100 keywords some very large positions. My question is quite simple(I wish)... What gives? I don't expect to see drops this large from not doing anything negative and I'm unsure it's an algorithm change as my other clients on Moz don't seem to have suffered either so it's either isolated to this target area or it's an issue with something occurring to or on the site? QfkSttI T42oGqA
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | snowflake740 -
PDF Sharing sites - scribd/dropbox/edocr/etc Cleaning Up SEO History
Howdy, Whilst in the process of cleaning up a new clients seo profile and have encountered a lot of techniques I am uncomfortable with and in my opinion should be removed. One technique I have not seen before is using a load of pdf sharing and video sites. The domains have high DA ratings, but to me the intention is highly questionable. The sites include: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tuxb8w1qowcm27i/Looking for boiler spares-geniune parts and consumables.pdf?dl=0 http://www.scribd.com/doc/241542076/Looking-for-Boiler-Spares-geniune-Parts-and-Consumables http://www.divshare.com/download/26207602-569 And so the list goes on for about 50 domains. Am I correct to be concerned here and what was the seo plan here? Thanks in advance. Andy Southall. (Marz Ventures)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarzVentures0 -
How does google view...
I have two urls that are almost the same for example: www.mysite.co.uk/motoring/car_fuel www.mysite.co.uk/motoring/car-fuel both pages are very different, but on the same topic. How does google view the use of _ and - in urls? Will it see my urls as different? Please advise if you know the answer. Thank You.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JamesT0 -
The purpose of these Algo updates: To more harshly push eCommerce sites toward PPC and enable normal blogs/forums toward reclaiming organic search positions?
Hi everyone, This is my first post here, and absolutely loving the site and the services. Just a quick background, I have dabbled in SEO in the past, and have been reading up over the last few months and am amazed at the speed at which things are changing. I currently have a few clients that I am doing some SEO work for 2 of them, and have had an ecommerce site enquire about SEO services. They are a medium sized oak furniture ecommerce site. From all the major changes..the devaluing of spam links, link networks, penalization of overuse of exact match anchor text and the overall encouraging of earned links (often via content marketing) over built links, adding to this the (not provided) section in Google Analytics, and the increasing screen real estate that PPC is getting over organic search...all points to me thinking on major thing..... That the search engine is trying to push eCommerce sites and sites that sell stuff harder toward using PPC and paid advertising and allowing the blogs/forums and informational sites to more easily reclaim the organic part of the search results again. The above is elaborated on a bit more below.. POINT 1 Firstly as built links (article submission, press releases, info graphic submission, web 2.0 link building ect) rapidly lose their effectiveness, and as Google starts to place more emphasis on sites earning links instead - by producing amazing interesting and unique content that people want to link to. The fact remains that surely Google is aware that it is much harder for eCommerce sites to produce a constant stream of interesting link worthy content around their niche (especially if its a niche that not an awful lot could be written about). Although earning links is not impossible for eCommerce sites, for a lot of them it is more difficult because creating link worthy content is not what eCommerce sites were originally intended for. Whereas standard blogs and forums were built for that exact purpose. Therefore the search engines must know that it is a lot easier for normal blogs/forums to "earn" links through content, therefore leading to them reclaiming more of the organic search ranking for transaction and non transaction terms, and therefore forcing the eCommerce sites to adopt PPC more heavily. POINT 2 If we add to the mix the fact that for the terms most relevant to eCommerce sites, the search engine results page has a larger allocation of PPC ads than organic results (above the fold), and that Google has limited the amount of data that sites can see in terms of which keywords people are using to arrive on their sites, which effects eCommerce sites more - as it makes it harder for them to see which keywords are resulting in sales. Then this provides further evidence that Google is trying to back eCommerce sites into a corner by making it more difficult for them to make sense of and track sales from organic results in comparison to with PPC, where data is still plentiful. Conclusion Are the above just over exaggerations? Can most eCommerce sites still keep achieving a good percentage of sales from organic search despite the above? if so, what do the more niche eCommerce sites do to "earn" links when content topics are thin and unique outreach destinations can be exhausted quickly. Do they accept the fact that the are in the business of selling things, so should be paying for their traffic as opposed to normal blogs/forums which are not. Or is there still a place for them to get even more creative with content and acquire earned links..? And finally, is the concentration on earned links more overplayed than it actually is? Id really appreciate your thoughts on this..
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
Looking for recent bad SEO / black hat example such as JC Penney example from 2011
I am giving a presentation in a few weeks and looking for a "what not to do" larger brand example that made poor SEO choices to try and game Google with black hat tactics. Any examples you can point me to?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jfeitlinger0 -
I think my site is affected by a Google glitch...or something
Although google told me No manual spam actions found i had not received an unnatural link request notice i figured it would be a good idea to clean these up so i did. So i have submitted 3 reconsideration requests from google. They all came back with the same response: No manual spam actions found. I really doubt that anyone at google really checked those out.You will notice that i don't even appear on page 1-10 at all...its clearly google filtering the site out from the results(except for my brand terms), but i have no idea what for.What do you guys think it is? If you see anythign let me know so i can have it fixed.This has been going on for 2 months now...my company has been around for a long time...i dont understand why suddenly im not showing up in searches for the keyword si used to rank for...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CMTM0 -
How google treats RSS fetcher?
All I want to know how google treats RSS fetcher. I want to push my blogs to my own website. Both are there on the same domain . But I want them to be updated automatically on the home page of my website through RSS fetcher if i create it on my blog page. My site name is http://www.myrealdata.com and my blog site name is http://www.myrealdata.com/blog
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SangeetaC0 -
Why did Google reject us from Google News?
I submitted our site, http://www.styleblueprint.com to Google to pontentially be a local news source in Nashville. I received the following note back: We reviewed your site and are unable to include it in Google News at this
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | styleblueprint
time. We have certain guidelines in place regarding the quality of sites
which are included in the Google News index. Please feel free to review
these guidelines at the following link: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3 Clicking the link, it anchors to the section that says: These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. etc... Now we have never intentionally tried to do anything deceptive for our rankings. I am new to SEOmoz and new to SEO optimization in general. I am working through the errors report on our campaign site but I cannot tell what they are dinging us for. Whatever it is we will be happy to fix it. All thoughts greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Jay0