Google changed its recommendations for structured data on products. To make clear which product-related pages are eligible for structured data, Google Search Central revised its Products Structured Data guide.
Product Structured Data
Search engines may be informed about a web page using structured data. It is not intended to be viewed by website visitors.
Structured data is used by search engines to better comprehend web pages. Additionally, it enables search engines to present the material offered in structured data in an appealing and useful way, which may increase traffic to web pages.
Implementing the markup following Google’s guidelines is essential, especially for product structured data.
Google displays detailed product results in both Google search and Google pictures. Products with rich results show details like price, reviews from customers, and availability.
Like all of Google’s published rules for using structured data, the criteria for product-rich results are rigorous on the sorts of pages that can utilize the data. The primary requirement for product structured data is that it may only be displayed on pages that are specifically dedicated to a particular product.
Structured Data For Product Variants
Products are often available in a variety of sizes, models, and colors. Retailers frequently publish product pages on their websites that have many variants of the same product. This makes it simple for potential customers to explore, contrast, and choose several product versions.
What about websites, though, that post many web pages for the various iterations of the same product? Is it OK to utilize the same structured data across all web pages with a few small variations? Or do you choose a single page to serve as the product’s representative and use the structured data there?
To make it clearer how to utilize structured data for product variations, Google Search Central amended the recommendations for product structured data.
For each product, the instructions for using structured data stay the same. Only sites dedicated to a single web page can use structured data in rich results at this time.
What has changed is that Google has made it clear that websites that are devoted to variants of a single product can be eligible for rich results and can gain from having their structured data. The product variant page has to be published on a “different URL” to be eligible for a rich result.
The product structured data guidance states:
“Use markup for a specific product, not a category or list of products. For example, “shoes in our shop” is not a specific product. Currently, product-rich results only support pages that focus on a single product.”
Then it shows the updated guidance immediately after the previous sentence:
“This includes product variants where each product variant has a distinct URL.”
What’s The Big Deal?
Any ambiguity on whether to include structured data on product pages that display the same product in several forms is resolved by Google’s new guidelines.
A retailer may, for instance, have a web page dedicated to a shoe and then several more websites for the various colors of that shoe. The websites for the many shoe colors may each have their product-specific structured data, making them eligible for Google-rich results.
Naturally, this does not alter any search-related recommendations that caution against developing cookie-cutter pages, which are effectively the same page with minimal differences.
