I recently purchased and installed Alt-Team's Rich Snippets add-on to improve the appearance of my products in Google search results. It's only been a few days so nothing has changed in the Google search results yet.
I was poking around in my Google Webmaster's account this morning and noticed something called “Data Highlighting.” This seems to be something very similar to rich snippets but done in a different way. Basically you highlight things like product name, price, availability, star rating, etc. and then these show up similar to rich snippets in the results. You mark up one or several of your product pages and then Google applies that to the rest of your products automatically.
I was just wondering if anyone had tried this and how it compares to rich snippets. I guess the only downside of doing it the data highlighting way would be that this would only apply to Google search results, not others.
Let me know if you have experience with this. Thanks.
Basically its all schema.org html5 microdata tags. What Alt team does is only add a few of these tags, while Google wants you to apply this to the whole of your pages.
See: [url=“http://schema.org/”]http://schema.org/[/url]
[url=“http://blog.schema.org/”]http://blog.schema.org/[/url]
http://www.heppnetz…/goodrelations/
So P-Pharma you recommend not using the Alt-Team's addon, but rather using Data Highlighting? From what I'm reading, one should use one or the other, not both.
If Googles Data Highlighter is as effective as advertised then you can do without the addon. But this is something that needs to be tested.
The Google Data Highlighter should be able to highlight things like category, breadcrumb, product name, brand, manufacturer, product code, stock, reviews, rating, price, discount, color, height, size, model, features, image, company location, a vast number of business details, etc. so that goes way beyond what the addon can do.
I started to mark up a product with the data highlighter and it looked really easy.
OK. Sorry for the repeat posting, but here are the results of my further research on this topic: stick with rich snippets. Google's data highlighter does not add any markup to your site, so the snippets will only be used on Google search results. No other search engines will use them. The other major search engines have agreed to recognize and use the schema.org markup. So long term, you are better off marking up your pages.
So, for the record, I will not be using the data highlighter.
The highlighter is basically a tool by google that adds attributes to your content without any necessary coding.
In short you should use the highlighter for parts of your website that don't have rich snippets implemented.
Have any of you figured out where to tag the product image URL? I've tried to do it in the image.tpl but I can't get the itemprop='image' to show up in the page code.
This looks very intersting! [url=“http://www.binpress.com/app/cscart-microdata/1047”]http://www.binpress.com/app/cscart-microdata/1047[/url]
Google is now using my rich snippets in search results (see attached).
Flow, do you think the addon you linked to is equivalent to the Alt-Team's…better…not as good?
I do note that the one you linked to is for v2.x of the cart. I'm on 3.0.6.
Glad you posted this up Flow as I forgot to drop it in here too.
The Microdata addon does indeed work with V3.0.6 (if you follow the very simple instructions to change the folder name from base to basic) and, in my opinion, better than other offerings offering similar functionality, the fact it covers more than just products at a fraction of the price of other Rich Snippets addons available, makes this one a steal!
Grant, have you actually used this addon?
Yes I have.
I would just like to implement the “next” and “previous” rich snippet code on the category results pages. Anyone know how to do this without an addon?
[quote name='StellarBytes' timestamp='1369765014' post='162605']
the fact it covers more than just products at a fraction of the price of other Rich Snippets addons available,
[/quote]
“covers more than just products” … such as?
[quote][list]
[]Adds microdata aware breadcrumbs.
[]Wraps your product with rich schemantics about price,brand,category,image and description of the product
[]Adds schemantics on availabilities
[]Adds schemantics about your company
[*]Takes care of other seo things like proper meta descriptions, Google,Bing,Yandex webmaster tools
[/list]
[/quote]
OK. Would you be able to post a screenshot of how this displays in Google search results?
[quote name='kingsleypress' timestamp='1369763192' post='162602']
Google is now using my rich snippets in search results (see attached).
Flow, do you think the addon you linked to is equivalent to the Alt-Team's…better…not as good?
I do note that the one you linked to is for v2.x of the cart. I'm on 3.0.6.
[/quote]
I want this kind of listing badly. I installed the Microdata addon from Binpress and even though my newest products (added to the store since the Microdata addon was installed) are now indexed on Google, the Rich Snippets format is NOT being displayed: no price, no rating, no availability. I did get breadcrumbs to show up redundantly though: big whoop.
KingsleyPress, How do you like the addon from Alt-Team for Rich Snippets?
I think I have to uninstall the Microdata addon and purchase and install the Alt-Team addon to get the results like you achieved. $99 is worth it - if it works!
Magpie Don,
If I hadn't already purchased the addon from Alt-Team, I would probably have purchased the one from Binpress. However, it looks like I may have gotten lucky if it's not working for you.
I just did some random searches on some of my products and it appears that Google is not including the extra data (reviews, in stock, price, etc.) on all products. It seems like all my better selling products do, though. I'm not sure what criteria it uses…number of searches, clickthroughs, or what? (how would Google know which are my best selling products?)
Anyway, I'm happy with the addon. If I remember correctly, I did have a hiccup at first and Alt-Team had to do some tweaks on my site. Make sure once you install the addon that you actually go to Google's rich snippets testing tool to make sure it's working correctly. I didn't do that, and kept wondering why the extra data wasn't showing up in results. I finally woke up and tested it in Google's tool, and something else on my site (another addon perhaps) was conflicting with it.
Good luck!