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John Mueller Google Hangouts Session: Schema Markup

Written by Emma Phillips on . Posted in DIGITAL CONSULTANCY, GOOGLE, INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS, SEO.

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Google frequently arranges live Google Hangout sessions online, hosted by its Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, who runs one-on-one sessions with a select group of search specialists.

WMG’s Dan Picken attends these sessions to ensure he’s at the leading edge of search science, asking the questions that will enable us to keep our clients’ businesses fully optimised online.

On 15 January 2016, Dan asked the following question:

How long does it take to recognise schema markup in SERPs?

For us here at WMG, this is an interesting question as we have had several clients where the schema markup in the SERPs has taken some time to process. For those of you who are unfamiliar with schema markup, it essentially improves the way your page displays in the SERPs, providing rich snippets of content that are more appealing to the searcher.

We put this question to John Mueller and he explained that there are 2 aspects to this.

Aspect 1

On the one hand they should be able to recognise it fairly quickly, typically within a couple of crawls, and take that information for processing.

Aspect 2

The difficulty then lies in the second part, which is separate to the crawling and indexing of the schema markup. The process is generally where they try and determine whether or not they can trust the schema markup before they can show it, including whether it is marked up correctly and being used in the right way.

If there are no issues, then they should be able to show it in a day or so, but it does all depend on this second stage process.

So, if you are having issues, try the following:

  1. Check the testing tool in WMT. You will quickly be able to identify whether there are any issues with your schema markup
  2. Ensure that it is implemented correctly so that it is compliant with Google’s guidelines on schema markup
  3. Make sure your website is of a high quality with high quality content
  4. And if all else fails, why not raise it in the webmaster central help forum and they will be able to point you in the right direction.

You can see John’s response here in the Google Webmaster Office Hours Hangout:

https://youtu.be/gfXGfvKJnPY?t=43[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]