Documentation/Rich Snippets

= Study: Site Owners Are Too Impatient When It Comes to Google Rich Snippets =

Abstract: As part of our Semantic SEO research, we analyzed the behavior of Web shop operators when it comes to using structured data markup. e.g. GoodRelations or schema.org, for getting Google Rich Snippets in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). We can see very clearly that the number one reason for failure is that site owners are too impatient and remove the markup way too early, likely because they do not see the intended effect in Google. A clear majority of the shops we analyzed shows Rich Snippets if the markup has been present for at least 30 days.

Google Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets are an important feature of the Google search engine. A Rich Snippet is a set of additonal, likely relevant details about a page shown directly in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Typical examples are Rich Snippets for products, which can include Product picture data is being crawled by Google but not currently shown, likely for performance reasons.
 * rating information (stars and number of reviews),
 * price and currency, and
 * availability.

Extension Modules for Shop Software
There are many ways of providing the data for the search engines, including the usage of schema.org and GoodRelations data markup in your article detail pages. The fastest and simplest way, by far, of adding Rich Snippets to a shop site is using one of the free GoodRelations modules for shop software packages, as listed here:

http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/Shop_extensions

Goal of this Study
In this study, we want to find out