Structured Data & Schema

After configuring pages to send structured data to Google, it will be able to display the structured data results the next time it crawls and indexes that page.

If a site has different structured markup on their desktop and mobile sites, Google would use the schema that is on the version they are currently crawling and indexing. It’s a little different with AMP as certain structured data types are required for some AMP features, so Google also takes this into account. John recommends ensuring the structured data types used across the different versions of a page are consistent.

In order for Google to display product structured markup, you need to include either reviews or a price. If you do not have reviews or prices on your page, the rich results type will not be shown. This will not impact the rankings of the page, just how it is displayed.

With some rich results types Google may introduce them first to one country in order to understand the right approach and how it should be handled, before rolling them out globally.

Structured markup needs to be included on both the AMP and the normal version of a page to be displayed in search e.g. article markup.

FAQ schema is not guaranteed to appear every time the page is displayed in search results. This is similar to rich results, where Google will look at different factors before showing them. Google also tries to limit the rich result types seen in search results, to prevent them from becoming overloaded.

Google still relies on some elements of manual input from webmasters in order to be able to correctly highlight structured markup. One example of this is within rich results, where individual elements of a page need to be extracted for Google to properly understand. John explained that it is currently difficult for these to be extracted automatically.

PageSpeed Insights and the Structured Data Testing Tool use different IP addresses than Googlebot. There isn’t a list of IP addresses that they currently use, so check this using a test page and analyse the requests coming from these tools.

If structured data is being picked up by the various testing tools, this means that Google should be able to pick it up too. However, if you’re injecting markup with JavaScript then ensure you use tools that render rather than just testing the static HTML.

Some rich results can combine two structured markup types in the search results, however, some can clash so Google will only pick one to show. There is no way of giving prioritisation to different markup types, rather Google’s algorithms will determine the best one to display.