Rich Snippet Testing Tool Broken?

According to Google, 2018 will be a huge year for structured data. To celebrate the occasion they have released a new testing tool for rich snippets to test your page eligibility. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to work…

What I learned

• 2018 will be a big year for structured data
• Structured data benefits Google more than you
• Rich snippets/Featured Answers will be integral to results
• The new testing tool for rich results isn’t perfect
• Video bloggers will be upset by video censoring

SEO Resources

Video Transcript

Welcome back, Rankers. Happy New Year! 2018! I said it wouldn’t happen.
Well, here we are. Big year, this year, for us. Lots of things happening. I’ve got a book coming out soon, so I’ll let you know about that.
Getting a lot of people commenting on the YouTube Channel. If you want to discuss some of these topics that we’re talking about, or you disagree with me strongly that’s cool, the best way to do it is jump onto the YouTube Channel and get into the comments there. Getting a lot of people doing that. Lot of people disagree with me about the net neutrality thing that I did last year, which is fine.
But, get on … Appreciate everyone’s feedback. Get on the YouTube Channel, subscribe please. I need more subscribers, I do a rubbish job of getting subscribers. Youtube.com/jimboot to subscribe to the channel. You’ll see all this stuff no matter where you’re watching it. If you subscribe you’ll still get the updates.
I wanted to talk to you just briefly today about … I’m not gonna do, “Hey, what’s big for us, you know, in 2018.” Well, there is one thing that’s probably gonna be big, ’cause Google’s already said, “Hey, it’s gonna be big in 2018. This thing.”
Structured Data 2018
It’s structured data. I told you about this last November when I got back from speaking at Pubcon. One of the things that Gary Illyes was talking about there, was structured data’s gonna be good. You know, he’s saying, I sort of credited the other day as saying, “I would put structured data on everything.” It’s like, oh, yeah, okay. Look, structured data’s great for Google, because Google can then use that information that it finds on the webpage and create products like their, you know, hotels and all of these things. Where they can just scrape the data from just using structured data and put it in a nice easy to view format for the user within their ecosystem. Not within yours.
But it’s also got a bunch of other effects too. Like, rich snippets for products and those sorts of things. Now, they have, speaking of rich snippets, they released this just before Christmas and basically it’s a new testing tool for rich results tests and it doesn’t work. Well, the one I tested on this morning doesn’t work, and I think I know why.
Rich Snippet Testing Tool
So, this is a rich results test I’ve done, ‘problogger-make money blogging,’ and it states that the “Page is not eligible for rich results.” Aww. However, when we go and do a search for “make money blogging” we can see that we do indeed have a rich result. Now, we call these featured answers. Some people call them rich answers. But basically they’re answers, right. Google has said when they first came out and we got this one a couple of years ago, this is the first one I did. Google said back then that it doesn’t actually need structured data, one of these featured answers. But, the rich snippets tool says that it’s not eligible for a rich snippet and I thought that was a rich snippet. But, there you go. We are appearing there for that rich snippet.
One of the things that made me go, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s new.” Was also, just the other day, I was responding to someone’s comment about this video, which was a response to the SEO trolls that came out and left fake reviews everywhere. I just did the search in Google ’cause I’d noticed a spike in traffic, and I did the search in Google and all of a sudden I saw, whoa we’ve got a featured video position. We’d never had that before. But, you know, I’ve seen these featured video positions before and this ones got, now, over 25,000 views. So, it could be something to do with that. But, what was really interesting for me, and it’s probably gonna upset a lot of publishers possibly a lot of video bloggers is this information here. Suggested clip, 121 seconds. Now that link there has got a time code in that link and it goes directly to one minute and, what is it? 23? 33. One minute and 33 seconds, and it bypasses the pre-roll ad that I’ve got on it.
So, there’s a lot of controversy at the moment with Google, or YouTube censoring, or removing the ability for a video to have advertising on it, because the video might be controversial. Advertisers don’t want to be associated with that, whatever it is. A lot of people are really upset about that. But, Google’s doing it to themselves. They’re doing it in the rich results, so they’re saying, “No, you don’t want to see that.” And just go straight to the results.
So, interesting stuff but if you want to go and have a play with the rich snippets tool, not the structured data tool totally separate thing. The rich snippets tool, where is that, it’s search.google.com/ test/rich-results. So, that’s how you can test your rich results, but doesn’t seem to work for featured answers. Probably works for, I don’t know I’ll play with it tonight, but probably works for rich featured products. Product snippets, those sorts of things.
Hopefully that’s helpful. It’s gonna be a great year. Hope it’s gonna be an awesome year for you, and we will see you next week. Keep the comments coming, if you’re a blogger make sure you get onto bloggersseo.com, join the Facebook group and we’re doing, you know, free audits about three times a week in there. So, get onto that and we will see you next week. Thanks everyone. Bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.