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Rich Snippets & Structured data

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What is a Rich snippet?

Rich snippet is a term used by search engines for the enhanced listing items on search engine result pages.

Rich snippets include elements like:

For eCommerce products:

  • Star ratings
  • Number of reviews
  • Product name
  • Product price
  • Availability

For content articles:

  • Author
  • Title
  • Image
  • Ratings
  • Publication date.

What does a Rich Snippet look like?

Basic snippet:

poor snippet

Rich Snippet:

rich snippet

What is Structured Data?

"Schema.org is a joint effort, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, to improve the web by creating a structured data markup schema supported by major search engines.

On-page markup helps search engines understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results. A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts.

Search engines want to make it easier for people to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure." - Schema.org

Types of schemas that you can match your content to are defined here.

How do we use structured data?

The use of Structured Data / Rich Snippets / Schemas in your HTML markup is not required, but it does benefit general SEO and everyone who uses your website whether they are visitors or other site operators.

Just like Opengraph the objective is to add as much context to the search result snippet as possible to give the user relevant information that will convince them that your result is the one they are looking for. Due to this the snippets have became known asĀ  Rich snippets.

Rich Snippets Benefits

  • Search engines are able to return more relevant results by having more info
  • Users can determine the relevancy of specific results more easily thanks to added context
  • Site operators may benefit from better visitors with less bounce rates due to users having more context about any given content before they decide to click through

Getting Rich Snippets on your Drupal site

Rich Snippets are a privilege, not a right!

The fact that you have implemented structured data on your site does not mean search engines are going to show your snippet as a rich snippet. Google in particular will first analyse and assess your markup before starting to display richer results.

From what we have researched, and from our own experience, we tend to follow this particular pattern for seeing rich snippets, which starts as soon as your production site has structured data implemented.

  1. Google only starts analysing the new markup 10 to 14 days after it is first introduced on a website
  2. Once Google is happy with your implementation they will then start to show rich snippets for some pages
  3. After roughly 5-7 days those rich snippets will disappear
  4. Another 5-7 days later some rich snippets will reappear
    The rich snippets may be for a different set of pages so don't panic if you cant find the same snippets
  5. Steps 3 & 4 may be repeated a number of times
  6. After roughly 8 weeks you will be rewarded with Rich Snippets throughout your site. These are likely to disappear and reappear based on where you are appearing in organic search

To get from step 1 to 6 you must not have any issues with your markup so make sure to test it using this tool and remember that Google and other search engines regularly change their guidelines for how structured data should be implemented, so make sure to keep up to date and test regularly!

How to configure Rich Snippets in Drupal 8?

The RDF UI module for Drupal helps us add extra data in our HTML that will produce Rich Snippets. Use Schema.org to match your content to the relevant schema (types of structured data).

You will also need to add your site's information in your HTML.

Use Googles documentation as a reference for testing that your schema has been defined correctly. Use Schema.org to define and create your structured data in JSON-LD format. They have examples for each type of schema.

The Next Step

If you'd like to discuss how to use social media marketing to engage with your audience, or improve the effectiveness of social media on your Drupal website get in touch.

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About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web