What Is A Rich Snippet?

Date First Published: 16th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what a rich snippet is in this article.

A rich snippet is an enhanced snippet in the search results that contains additional information. The additional information could be structured data, such as the star rating, price information, date recorded, genre, release date, cooking time, number of votes, number of calories, recipe ingredients, and more. Unlike a featured snippet, they can appear anywhere in the search results, do not have a box around them, and are not set apart from other search engine listings.

Note:

Structured data is a piece of code in a specific format written in a way that Google and other search engines can read and understand it.

Benefits Of Rich Snippets

Because searchers prefer to click on results that give them more information and they stand out from the other results, rich snippets result in an increased organic click-through rate and organic traffic. Rich results are designed to be more visually appealing than normal search results, which can get lost in SERPs and are harder to grab a searcher’s attention.

How To Find Out Whether A Page Supports Rich Snippets

In order to find out whether a page supports rich snippets, copy and paste your code into Google’s Rich Result Testing Tool. If your page supports rich results, you should get a success message saying that the page is eligible for rich results along with the detected items.

An example of structured data for a product can be seen below. The structured data can be in HTML or JSON and for less experienced users, microdata will be easiest to understand. Google will interpret them both in the same way, but they prefer JSON. According to John Mueller of Google, "We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new structured data that kind of comes out for JSON-LD first. So that’s what we prefer."

Rich Snippet Spam

Since website owners could add code that they want to and get the featured snippet straight away, this increased the chances of rich snippet spam, which is against Google’s webmaster guidelines. In 2019, Google took action against rich snippet spam and updated its rules for when and how it shows rich search results and review stars. The new rules were that there is now a defined set of schema for review snippets, self-serving reviews are prohibited, and the name of the thing being reviewed is required.

Before the update, a business could just add a review schema to their HTML or embed a third-party widget and they would get 5 little stars in their snippets. Google decided that it was too easy to manipulate and they removed spammy star ratings. Website owners should choose the appropriate schema for their page, not the schema they think looks the most visually appealing in the search results page or else Google will remove the rich snippet or they could remove all the rich snippets. Google is penalising websites that spam structured data markup.

Does Adding Schema Improve Rankings?

Google uses complex algorithms to rank pages, but adding schema (structured data) to a page is definitely not a ranking factor. That would be too easy to manipulate. Schema helps Google and searchers to understand what a page is about, but John Mueller of Google said that "There's no generic ranking boost for SD usage. That's the same as far as I remember. However, SD can make it easier to understand what the page is about, which can make it easier to show where it's relevant (improves targeting, maybe ranking for the right terms). (not new, IMO)"