Troubleshooting Rich Snippets Missing from SERPS


Far too often you go to the trouble to add your rich snippets and for one reason or another they don't show up in the search results. If the process was done correctly, your rich snippets would begin to appear in the search results as soon as Google has crawled the page with the markup. If that's not the case, then as you most likely know, the first step to trouble shooting missing structured data is to run each individual page through the Structured Data Testing Tool and correct any issues that are found.

If you've already taken that step and your rich snippets still don't show up then, according to Google's John Mueller, it's most likely a page quality issue. In a webmaster hangout John gave this tip about page quality and snippets:

Usually if you do a site query for a site, we will show the rich snippets, if it's implemented technically correct. So that's a good way to kind of double check that we can pick up the markup properly. And we're not showing it in normal search results, then that's really a sign that we're essentially not sure about the quality of the website.

It seems that this quality issue isn't always a site wide problem and it's common to find that your snippets are showing up for one page and not on another or maybe some features of the snippet will show up and not others. Such as, your product pricing will show up but not reviews.

A quick way to find out if page quality is the reason your rich snippets are missing is to do two quick searches for your site to see if BOTH return snippets.

1. Do a simple brand or company search for your website.

2. Do a simple search for a keyword you're ranking highly for.

If you are seeing snippets for your brand search and NOT your keyword search then, according to Google, that is a big indication that page quality is enough of an issue that Google does not feel like the page qualifies for snippets to appear. However, if the page is high quality and this doesn't seem to apply to your situation at all then there are a few other factors that we've discovered over the years that can play a part such as:

  • Traffic to the page – If your mark up is totally on point and the page is top quality then we've discovered that low traffic pages struggle to get their snippets in the search results. Try pushing m...

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