Tag: Rich Snippets

Yoast SEO’s hidden features that secretly level up our SEO

Joost de Valk

If you use Yoast SEO on your website, you’re probably familiar with features like the SEO analysis or the snippet preview. You might even know that you can easily link to related posts or create redirects in the premium version of the plugin. But there’s (much) more. For instance, the Yoast SEO plugin has so-called hidden features. You won’t find them in your settings, but they do great work. Today, we’ll dive into these hidden features: which ones do we have and how do they lighten your load?

Why hidden features?

There are many choices on how to optimize your site. When developing our Yoast SEO plugin, we don’t translate all these choices into settings. In fact, we try to make as few settings as possible. If we believe something is beneficial for every Yoast SEO user, it’s on. We call these features hidden features because as a user you’re not necessarily aware of their existence. You might even think we don’t have certain features because there’s no setting for it. While in fact we just take care of things for you.

The hidden features of Yoast SEO

To help you understand what Yoast SEO does for your website in the background, we’ve listed some of the hidden features for you below. Let’s go through them one by one!

1. A structured data graph

Yoast SEO outputs a fully-integrated structured data graph for your posts and pages. What’s that? And how does that help you optimize your site?

Some years ago, search engines came up with something called Schema.org to better understand the content they crawl. Schema is a bit like a glossary of terms for search engine robots. This structured data markup will help them understand whether something is a blog post, a local shop, a product, an organization or a book, just to name a few possibilities. Or, whether someone is an author, an actor, associated with a certain organization, alive or even a fictional character, for instance.

For all these items there’s a set of properties that specifically belongs to that item. If you provide information about these items in a structured way – with structured data – search engines can make sense of your site and the things you talk about. As a reward, they might even give you those eye-catching rich results.

Hence, adding structured data to your site’s content is a smart thing to do. But, as the number of structured data items grows, all these loose pieces of code can end up on a big pile of Schema markup on your site’s pages. Yoast SEO helps you prevent building this unorganized pile of code. For every page or post, it creates a neat structured data graph. In this graph, it connects the loose pieces of structured data with each other. Therefore, a search engine can understand, for instance, that a post is written by author X, working for organization Y, selling brand Z.

A structured data graph: Yoast SEO connects blobs of Schema markup in one single graph, so search engines understand the bigger picture.

If you want to learn more about this, we’d advise reading Edwin’s story on how Yoast SEO helps search engine robots connect the dots.

2. Self-referencing canonicals

Canonicals were introduced quite some years ago as an answer to duplicate content. Duplicate content means that the same or very similar content is available on multiple URLs. This confuses search engines: If the same content is shown on various URLs, which URL should they show in the search results?

Duplicate content can exist without you being aware of it. In an online store, for instance, one product might belong to more than one categories. If the category is included in the URL, the product page can be found on multiple URLs. Or perhaps you add campaign tags to your URLs if you share them on social or in your newsletter? This means the same page is available on a URL with and without a campaign tag. And there are more technical causes for duplicate content such as these.

The solution for this type of duplicate content issues is a self-referencing canonical. A canonical URL lets you say to search engines: “Of all the options available for this URL, this URL is the one you should show in the search results”. You can do so by adding a rel=canonical tag on a page, pointing to the page that you’d like to rank. In this case, you’d need the canonical tag to point to the URL of the original page.

So, should you go through all your posts now and add it? Not if you’re using Yoast SEO. The plugin does this for you, everywhere on your site: single posts and pages, homepages, category archives, tag archives, date archives, author archives, etc. If you’re not such a techy person, the canonical isn’t easy to wrap your head around. Or, perhaps, you just don’t have the time to focus on it. So let Yoast SEO take care of it and move on to more exciting stuff!

Read more: rel=canonical: the ultimate guide »

3. Paginated archives with rel=next / rel=prev

Another hidden feature in Yoast SEO is rel=next / rel=prev. It’s a method of telling search engines that certain pages belong to an archive: a so-called paginated archive. A rel=next / prev tag in the header of your site lets search engines know what the previous and the next page in that archive is. Nobody else than people looking at the source code of your site and search engines see this piece of code.

Not so long ago, Google announced that it isn’t using rel=next/prev anymore. Does this mean we should do away with this feature? No, certainly not! Bing and other search engines still use it, so Yoast SEO will keep on adding rel=next / prev tags to paginated archives.

Keep reading: Pagination and SEO: best practices »

4. Nofollow login & registration links

If you have a WordPress site, you most likely have a login link and a registration link somewhere on your site. But the login or registration page of your WordPress site are places visitors, nor search engines will ever have to be.

Therefore, Yoast SEO tells search engines not to follow links for login and registration pages. Yoast SEO makes sure that search engines will never follow these links. It’s a tiny tweak, but it saves a lot of unneeded Google action. 

5. Noindex your internal search results

This hidden feature is based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google wants to prevent users from going from a search result in Google to a search result page on a website site. Google, justly, considers that bad user experience.

You can tell search engines not to include a certain page in their search results by adding a noindex tag to a page. Because of Google’s guidelines, Yoast SEO tells search engines that they should not display your internal search results pages in their search results with a noindex tag. They just tell them not to show these pages in the search results; the links on these pages can still be followed and counted which is better for SEO.

Read on: Which pages should I noindex or nofollow on my site »

6. Removal of replytocom variables

This last hidden feature is quite a technical one. In short, it prevents your site from creating lots of URLs with no added value. WordPress has a replytocom feature that lets you reply to comments without activating JavaScript in your browser. But this means that for every comment, it creates a separate URL with ?replytocom variables.

The disadvantage of this is that if you get a lot of comments search engines have to index all those URLs, which is a waste of your crawl budget. Therefore we remove these variables by default.

Keep on reading: Why you should buy Yoast SEO Premium »

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Weekly SEO recap: mobile friendly & snippets

Joost de Valk

We’re working hard on our upcoming Yoast SEO 3.0 release. Multiple focus keywords is slowly proving itself to me as probably the best thing we’ve ever made. It wasn’t the hottest week in search, which is probably a good thing as we’ve had plenty of those recently, but still there’s some stuff to report, ranging from app interstitials to some news about search result snippets.

Joost's weekly SEO recap

App interstitial “penalty” now live

Google had warned us about this and I’ve written about this before, but it’s now live. In Google’s own words (and bolding):

Starting today, pages with an app install interstitial that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page won’t be considered mobile-friendly.

Not the most surprising change of the world, what surprises me is that they specifically penalize app interstitials and don’t seem to penalize newsletter popups as much… I’m no fan of any popup, even though admittedly even for us they work quite well. We only show a popup on “exit intent” though, so when you move your mouse towards one of the top corners of the screen. I’m guessing those will be OK for quite a while longer in Google’s eyes.

Optimize your YouTube videos

If you didn’t have reason enough just yet, there’s now one more reason to optimize your YouTube videos. Google has started showing featured snippets taken from the content of video transcripts. Your own site might take quite a while longer to get those, so using YouTube as an intermediate step might be a good idea here.

Ridiculously long snippets

Google ran a test this week that made quite a few of us question the sanity of some of their engineers. They tested a 7 line snippet. That’s a bit like… Yuck! When I tried to reproduce it I “only” got a 4 line description snippet and even that I’ve always thought is ridiculous.

Don’t hide content in JavaScript arrays

Another post from the SEM Post (they’re doing some awesome reporting), highlights a tweet from Gary Ilyes of Google about not hiding content in JavaScript arrays. It might be indexed, but it also might not be indexed. Rule of thumb: if you think a specific bit of content is useful to users: show it. If you think it’s OK to hide it by default, why do you have it in the first place?

That’s it, see you next week!

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Product page SEO: 5 things to improve

Michiel Heijmans

Besides optimizing your product pages for user experience, you want to make sure these pages are as good as possible for SEO as well. Obviously, you might think. In this post, we’ll show you a couple less obvious — at least for most website owners — elements of product page SEO and tell you why it’s so important to take these things into account.

1. The basics of product page SEO

A product page on an e-commerce site or online store is a page as well, so all the SEO things that matter for your content page, go for product pages as well. We could go even more into detail when discussing product page SEO, but for now, this will be your basic optimization. If you offer less than exciting products on your site, you may also want to read our post on SEO for boring products. But first:

  • Add a great title, focusing on the product name — including a manufacturer name, if applicable. If your product is, for instance, a small part of a larger machine (screw, tube), include the SKU as well. People might search that specific.
  • Add a proper, unique description of the product. Most of the times, that isn’t the description the manufacturer shipped with the product. That description might be used on hundreds of websites, only to be duplicate content and a sign of low quality for your website (to Google). Prevent duplicate content due to manufacturer descriptions at all times. If all your content (content pages, category pages, blog) is unique, and the content used on thousands of product pages isn’t, most of your site isn’t. Think about that and don’t take that lightly. Google’s collection of black and white animals is waiting for you. Create unique content.
  • Add an inviting meta description. Usually, a product page contains a lot of general information as well, varying from dimensions to terms of service. To avoid Google using that unrelated text in a meta description, you want to add a meta description to your product pages, even more than to content pages. We often see that meta descriptions are added in some kind of templated way, where just the product name is changed per product. That’s ok to start with, but ideally, all meta descriptions are unique.
  • Pick a great, easy to remember URL for your product pages.
  • Add high-quality, well-optimized images with proper ALT text. Include the product name in at least the main product image. This will help you do better in visual search. Also, don’t forget video — if applicable.
  • Add all the things mentioned in our Product Page UX post. UX is an important part of holistic SEO.

2. Add structured data for your products and get rich results

Structured data is an essential part of a modern SEO strategy and this also goes for product pages. There is specific Product Schema that helps you get highlighted search results, so-called rich results. In addition, you’d better mark up the reviews of your customers with Review structured data. All of this will make your product page stand out and increase the chance a potential customers clicks on your link in the search results.

The importance of this for your product page SEO is that the major search engines came up with this markup, not the W3C consortium. Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex agreed upon this markup, so they could identify product pages and all the product elements and characteristics more easily. Why would they want that? So they could a) index these pages a lot better and b) show you rich snippets like this:

That’s a lot of info in the search results, right?

The Product schema tells the search engine more about the product. It could include characteristics like product description, manufacturer, brand, name, dimensions, and color, but also the SKU we mentioned earlier. The Offer schema includes more information on price and availability, like currency and stock. It can even include something called priceValidUntil to let search engines know that the price offer is for a limited time only.

Schema.org has a lot of options, but only a limited set of properties are supported by search engines. For instance, see Google’s page on product page structured data to see what that search engines expects in your code and what it can do with it.

So this is why you want to add Schema.org data for product page SEO: easier to recognize for Google, and it makes sure to include important extra’s in Google already. If you have a WooCommerce shop, our WooCommerce SEO plugin takes care of a lot of this stuff behind the scenes.

Another reason to add it is to manage expectations from customers. Your visitor knows your price up front and knows that the product is in stock. Your potential client can even see how well-regarded your product or service is by looking at those beautiful stars in search. How’s that for user experience! And that brings us to number three.

3. Add real reviews

According to Pew Research, more than 80% of US consumers check reviews before buying anything online. Although not everyone trusts online reviews – research says they are probably right -, they can be very helpful. And if you are a local company online reviews are even more important. Most reviews tend to be extremely positive, but it might just be the negative reviews that give a better sense of what is going on with a company or product.

Leading Dutch online store Coolblue gives consumers a lot of options to make relevant and useful reviews of the products they buy

Try to get your customers to leave reviews and show them on your product page. Do you get negative reviews? Contact the writer, find out what’s wrong and try to mitigate the situation. Maybe they can turn their negative reviews into a positive one. And you’ve gained a great new insight into your work. Here’s how to grow your business with ratings and reviews. In addition, getting awesome testimonials is another way of showing your business means business.

Be sure to mark up your reviews and ratings with Review and Rating schema so search engines can pick them up and show rich results in the search results pages.

4. Make your product page lightning fast

People don’t like to wait. Waiting for a page to load costs money. In today’s mobile-focused world, every second counts. Even more so if you spent a lot of time and energy trying to get that potential customer to your product page in the first place. People expect a fast page and Google does so too. Of course, there’s a lot you can do. Here’s a small collection of posts that’ll you get started:

5. User test your product page

Looking at numbers in Google Analytics, Search Console or other analytical tools can give you a lot of insights into how people find and interact with your page. These insights might help you make changes to improve the performance of the page even more. While it’s essential to keep an eye on your product pages, there’s another way of ensuring the page is as awesome as it can be: user testing.

In their 2018 Product Page UX research project, the Baymard Institute found that “the average site has 24 structural UX issues on its product pages, and only 18% of the 60 top-grossing US and European e-commerce sites have a “good” or “acceptable” product page UX performance. The vast majority of benchmarked sites — 82% — have a “poor” or “mediocre” performance. And no sites have a “state of the art” product page UX performance.” You can read that fascinating study on their Product Page UX site.

The Baymard report has loads of insights into the most commons errors seen on product pages

There are loads of issues to check out, from terrible use of images, including non—functioning galleries to bad handling of out of stock products. It also seems that many sites fail to provide accurate shipping information and return information, which leads to trust issues – see the bonus item next in this article.

While you compare your product pages to external user research, don’t forget to do your own user testing! Doing proper research will give you eye-opening results that you probably wouldn’t have found yourself.

Bonus: Build trust and show people you are for real

Getting a stranger to buy something on your site revolves a lot about trust. Someone needs to know you are for real before handing you their hard-earned money, right? Google puts a lot of emphasis on the element of trust — it’s all over their famous Search Quality Raters Guidelines. The search engine tries to evaluate trust and expertise by looking at stuff like online reviews, the accolade a site or its authors receive, et cetera.

One of the most important things to come out of that is that you should really have your About us and Customer service pages in order. So be sure that people can easily find your contact information, plus information about returns and shipping, payment, privacy et cetera. Don’t forget!

TL;DR: Product page SEO

If you’re serious about optimizing your product page, you shouldn’t focus on the regular SEO and user experience alone. You’ll have to dig a little deeper into the other aspects of the product page on your online store. For instance, add Product and Offer Schema, so Google can easily index all the details about your product and show these as rich results in search result pages. Make your product pages load super fast, add user reviews and try to enhance the trustworthiness. Don’t forget to test everything you do!

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Weekly SEO Recap: app interstitials, snippets & knowledge panel

Joost de Valk

Joost's weekly SEO recapNext to Google getting a new logo, there was also actual news this week. Like… Google increased the height of its search box. Yes, really. Shocking, right? There’s more:

Do you have app interstitials? Drop them.

If you run a site that has an app interstitial, a popup asking the user to install your iPhone / Android app before leading them to the page they wanted to get to: stop it. The users never liked it, even though it might have worked, but Google has now decided it’s had enough. Google has even been kind enough to give us a cut-off date: November 1. Of course, none of this should come as a surprise, I wrote about it on June 5, when Googlers had already mentioned this would happen.

This app interstitial “penalty” also is just a continuation and an enhancement of what we referred to as “Mobilegeddon” a couple of months ago. I fully expect Google to become stricter and stricter in what it accepts in terms of User eXperience. It’s nice to see them announce changes like this though! Google says it doesn’t apply to cookie warnings and other popups, so no need to worry about those just yet.

Rich snippets don’t change your ranking

Rich snippets (explained here if you don’t know what they are) have become a prime weapon in the SEO’s arsenal over the years to improve the number of clicks you get from the search results. Recently, John Mueller of Google has said that they don’t impact your rankings. That’s not a reason to stop using them, their goal has always been to increase the number of people clicking on your result more than increasing the ranking, but it’s good to know.

Google adds quotes to knowledge panels

If you search for JRR Tolkien, the author of the famous Lord of the Rings novels, you’ll see some of the author’s quotes in the knowledge panel on the right. These quotes are new, showing one more case of Google disrupting an entire set of websites. This is yet another warning: your website has to add serious value if you want to get Google traffic. Value that Google cannot easily replicate. And even when you do add serious value, like Wikipedia, Google might take away some of that traffic.

If you want to learn more about knowledge panels in search results and don’t shy away from reading somewhat more technical posts, this post by Bill Slawski might be a good starting point. Bill analyzes tons of patents by Google (and a few others) on his blog all the time, leading to some very interesting insights in the world of SEO.

That’s it for this week, see you next week!

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This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: app interstitials, snippets & knowledge panel on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

Google’s Sitelinks Searchbox on WordPress, with or without Yoast SEO

Joost de Valk
Google sitelinks searchbox
An example of a Sitelinks Searchbox

A couple of years ago, Google introduced the Sitelinks Searchbox. When activated, this search box appears under the main URL for a given brand in the search results, above its sitelinks, hence the name. When you search for that brand in Google, you can directly use the site’s search engine. The results will be presented on the search results page of the relevant site.

How to add a Sitelinks Searchbox to your site

It’s not that difficult to make your site eligible for a Sitelinks Searchbox. The process consists of just three steps, and if you are a Yoast SEO user, it is even easier. This process takes care of the technical side, but, in the end, Google determines if your site gets a Searchbox. To be honest: Google does not show this Sitelinks Searchbox for most sites. So, let’s run through the required steps:

  1. Verify you have a functioning search engine

    For 99.5% of WordPress sites, this one is simple: you type example.com/?s=query (replacing example.com with your site’s URL), and you should see search results. If you don’t see search, and you’ve not made a conscious decision to move your search engine elsewhere, you might need to fix your theme.

  2. Add the necessary markup

    Adding the markup is simple if you’re on WordPress and use Yoast SEO. It could be that you don’t use the default search engine, in that case, you’ll need to change the URL using the built-in filter. If you don’t have a search engine: why not?

    If you don’t use Yoast SEO, you can add the necessary code by hand via an individual block of Schema.org code for structured data. Here’s a piece of example code from Google’s documentation, in this same document you’ll also find the requirements for a valid technical implementation. This uses JSON-LD to mark up the code in an efficient and readable way.

  3. Set up a preferred canonical URL for your homepage

    Step three, and again, this one is easy. When you use Yoast SEO, this has already been done for you. However, if you don’t have it installed, you’ll realize after reading this article that now is as good a time as any to install it. If you want – or need – to do it by hand, you can read up on canonical URL’s in our ultimate guide to rel=canonical.

    When you have done all of this and Google deems your site eligible, you might see something like the example above in the search results.

Check the Sitelinks Searchbox results in Google Search Console

A few days after enabling this you should have a Sitelinks searchbox report in Google Search Console. For those of you who have had Yoast SEO for a while, this report should already be there. If there are errors in that report, find out what they are and fix them. If not it’ll look something like this:

A screenshot of the Sitelinks Searchbox report in Google Search Console showing 1.5k URLs without errors.

Conclusion

As said before, it is not too hard to get your site ready for a Sitelinks Searchbox. If you use our Yoast SEO plugin, the necessary code is already built in. Now you just have to wait and see if Google deems your site eligible and shows a search box.

Read more: Structured data with Schema.org: the ultimate guide »

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