Schema.org Markup

While search engines read only the characters a human reads, there was no way to tell what a value on a page meant. A product page showing 4.6 gives no way to separate a review average from a price from a version number.

So information sitting on the page never reached the search result. Price and review score are both written on screen while the result shows a title and two lines of summary.

Each site inventing its own labels couldn't fix that. So the major search engines jointly published one shared vocabulary list, and the name of that list became the name of the format.

What this format solves is that machines can't tell what a value on a page means. Two things get answered.

1. The names are standardized. Names for kinds of content — product, article, review, FAQ — and names for kinds of values — price, rating — are fixed in a published list.
2. The shape of the search result changes. Star ratings, prices, event dates, and collapsible question lists appear alongside it. A result carrying that extra information is a rich snippet, and the larger area it occupies raises click-through rate (CTR), the share of impressions that get clicked.

The ranking itself does not move. What changes is how the result looks at the same rank, and therefore how many people come through.

The recommended way to add it is a separate block of values inside the page. The values have to match what's actually visible on screen — invent a star rating and the display disappears and a penalty follows. After adding it, check for errors with the validator the search engine provides.

If an earlier stage is blocked, none of this does anything. A page that never reached indexing, the step that registers a crawled page as searchable, has nowhere for the markup to appear.

"Add schema to the product pages. Price and rating need to show in the results."

A request to take up more area in the search result.

"We put 4.8 in the markup and there are no reviews on the page. That has to come out."

The marked-up value contradicts the page, which makes it a penalty risk.

"We added schema and the ranking didn't move. Rankings don't move from this."

What changes is the shape of the result, not the position.

At Pagedeck, Ravi added the article type to forty blog posts and the FAQ type to twelve help pages. The help pages began showing three collapsed questions in the result and click-through went from 2.1 percent to 3.4. The blog posts got no display change and showed no difference.