Hello All,

 

I asked recently about what defines if google displays pages under the main site on a search result(like this: https://i.imgur.com/UDf3eK7.png)

 

I have recently created a site around (2 months ago) and it still just shows in google with no pages underneath?

 

What can I do to try get pages underneath?

 

 

Any help would be great.

 

Aidan

Generally these things take time and trust, however if you can define the navigation with Microdata it would assist Google in working out which are just links and which are main navigational links.

 

Edit: Doh, forgot the link http://schema.org/SiteNavigationElement

Edited June 28, 20179 yr by BrowserBugs

I'm still not convinced it's worth much time and effort messing around with microdata unless things have changed since this article was published things look pretty bleak for the standard http://manu.sporny.org/2013/microdata-downward-spiral/

 

Happy to be proven wrong but I think bigger wins can be had elsewhere. Google should have no problem determining what are navigational links as they will all be relative to the current domain.

I'm still not convinced it's worth much time and effort messing around with microdata unless things have changed since this article was published things look pretty bleak for the standard http://manu.sporny.org/2013/microdata-downward-spiral/

 

Happy to be proven wrong but I think bigger wins can be had elsewhere. Google should have no problem determining what are navigational links as they will all be relative to the current domain.

 

"Full disclosure: I’m the chair of the RDFa Working Group and have been heavily involved during the RDFa and Microdata standardization initiatives. I am biased, but also understand all of the nuanced decisions that were made during the creation of both specifications."

 

Big names have picked it up, Zoopla, eBay for example, the ability to show stock, pre-order, things which are for sale, rental and more is prime mate, but meh, up to you, Google sees the need to support all types through their testing tool ... a bit of a waste of their time if this 2013 bias article is to be taken as gospel.

 

Edit: Here's a little snippet of what it's for ...

 

Edited June 28, 20179 yr by BrowserBugs

Taken from MDN which pretty much is gospel as far as web standards go:

 

The W3C HTML Working Group failed to find an editor for the specification and terminated its development with a 'Note' in 2013.

Maybe it's of some benefit of search engines, but it does nothing at all for accessibility or UX. If I really needed to improve my rankings I'd spend a little bit of time with it, but in terms of the entire project there are far bigger fish to fry.
I wouldn't say the article I posted was biased either, they have no conflicting interests and statements are well cited. When you have statistics such as only 1% of active domains using them you could see why it would benefit Google to focus more on actual content for rankings.

Edited June 28, 20179 yr by rbrtsmith

 

Maybe it's of some benefit of search engines, but it does nothing at all for accessibility or UX.

 

And this is my point, it's for the search engines and not UX or accessibility, it's to give relational context of page structure and content for the search engines without them having to rely on simply keywords they pick up on in a page, some of which might be of no relevance to the page as it's a lead in to another section, browser support is irrelevant. Humans can visually see the page layout, what's related to the page they are reading and what is general page structure. This is Search Engine Optimisation and not UX.

 

"Schema.org vocabulary can be used with many different encodings, including RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD. These vocabularies cover entities, relationships between entities and actions, and can easily be extended through a well-documented extension model."

 

The OP wanted to know if there was anything that could be done to assist the search engines in presenting site links. Site links are based off main navigational elements, the easier it is for the search engines to identify a navigational link vs a textual link the better.

<a href="/cheese">Cheese</a><a href="/wine">Wines & Spirits</a>
<h1>Welcome to the Shop</h1>
<p>We sell a wide range of <a href="/cheese">mature cheeses</a> and <a href="/wine">wines</a> from around the world.</p>

Which of these would make site links and what would the site link title be? But with markup ...

<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/SiteNavigationElement"><a href="/cheese" itemprop="url"><span itemprop="name">Cheese</span></a></span><span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/SiteNavigationElement"><a href="/wine" itemprop="url"><span itemprop="name">Wines & Spirits</span></a></span>
<h1>Welcome to Deli Heaven</h1>
<p>We sell a wide range of <a href="/cheese">mature cheeses</a> and <a href="/wine">wines</a> from around the world.</p>

... now the search engines know that those links are site navigation links and not part of the main document and the UX and accessibility has not been messed with. In addition it's clear what the title of the site links would be, they don't use meta titles or h1 from the cheese section for this.

 

Based on content alone if the user searches 'buy cheese' and there is a big article on a list of cheese someone bought and what they thought of it vs a site with list of cheeses that are for sale and both have good content then the search engines none the wiser, but if the shops cheeses were marked up as http://schema.org/Offer then the search engines know that offer means "An offer to transfer some rights to an item or to provide a service — for example, an offer to sell tickets to an event, to rent the DVD of a movie, to stream a TV show over the internet, to repair a motorcycle, or to loan a book." so could make a clearer decision based on user intent.

Edited June 29, 20179 yr by BrowserBugs