Note: We are aware that the recent addition of Schema structured data and Pinterest Rich Pins have not been applied to some stores. There are two possibilities for this, either you have created your own custom layout or you have had customization work done by us. Customizations such as these are not overwritten with the new release as it could have overwritten and lost your customizations. If you are unable to see or validate the structured data within your store and would like us to manually apply this, please open a ticket with support.
Schema.org is a collaborative effort by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages. The Schema.org markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages more quickly and easily to provide richer search results.
Google has a tool to test the rich snippets, however it can’t always display the exact look of the search results as it depends on the search queries: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.
How does schema work with CoreCommerce stores?
Your product detail pages will automatically have the schema applied allowing search engines to immediately crawl the structured data. You as the admin do not have to enable anything, or add any extra information, to get the structured data working. It uses the existing product data set in the admin.
If you update a product, the structured data will immediately show this new information as structured data. For example, if an item is on sale the structured data will show that price, not the full price, until such time as the sale ends or the price is manually changed in the admin. This applies to any product data (name, SKU, rating).
The schema enhances the data that’s already on the page, making it easier for search engines to find the information and display it in their search results. For example, currently search engines can’t "see" the rating of a product because it’s represented by an image (e.g. the 5 stars image); by adding the structured data, the search engines will be able to see the overall rating and the number of votes to display this in the search result.
Search engines will now be able to easily identify the following product data:
- Product name
- Product image
- Product price
- Product price currency
- Product category
- Product SKU
- Product description
- Product availability (In Stock, Out of Stock, Discontinued)
- Product sales (Price, Start/End Dates)
- Product customer rating (Displayed as stars in SERPS)
- Related products (set within product upsell options)
Search engines may not use all of the data above; they may only choose to use one or two elements of the data. It depends both on their policies regarding the display of search results and also the entered search query.
Rich snippets may not appear immediately, but if you use Google or Bing webmaster tools you should begin to see the structured data being tracked:
This is how a normal search result in Google would look, without any structured data:
This is typically how rich snippets will effect the display of search engine results (of course this may vary a bit, as it's dependent on the search engine and other factors):
Pinterest Rich Pins
The added structured data will also automatically enable Pinterest Rich Pins. Pinterest will pull the favicon for the store as well as the marked store name and product data such as the url, name, availability, price and currency.
Note: For products that are not in stock or discontinued, the Pinterest validator will show the 'availability' field as missing (or no info received). This will not stop the Rich Pins from working, however; it will only exclude the availability info from the pin if it's not in stock. This is an issue that appears to be on Pinterest's end and we are working with them to get it resolved.
As with the rich snippets, you will not need to do anything extra for Pinterest to get access to this data.
One thing you may have to do to enable the pins is to go to the validator and enter the URL of one of your products so that Pinterest can validate the markup. Once the markup is confirmed as correct, youl will have to apply to get them approved by Pinterest.
