Pre-Sales questions

Why should I use rich snippets?

According to the schema.org website 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. In fact: you can increase Click through rate.

Which snippets are supported by Google at the moment?

Every snippet is supported but there are some that have impacts on the search results. On their support sites the Google-guys wrote that the following snippets do so:

  • Apps
  • Autoren
  • Reviews
  • People
  • Products
  • Recipes
  • Events
  • Music

I’ve tested all snippets with the rich snippet testing tool. And they all seemed to work except the recipe ones. It doesn’t work even if you use their own example. I don’t really know if this is a bug in the rich snippet testing tool. It also seems that Google wants to replace the “People” rich snippet with their own Author-Snippet to show the Google+ profile picture beside search results. For this you can find another plugin here: Google+ Author Information in Search Results. Please note: It belongs to Google if rich snippets are shown in actual search results for your website. I hope this helps Greetings

Can you show me a live example?

On my demo page it took about 1 month to get Google showing it up in the search results. Now they’ve disappeared suddenly. This is maybe because Google wants you to use the snippets on a regular basis and not only on one or two pages. You can read more about this here. You can see: it belongs to Google if rich snippets are shown for your search results or not. If your snippet shows up correctly in the rich snippet testing tool, everything is fine and if the Google engine thinks it would be cool to show it on your search results then they will show it. Unfortunately there is no guarantee.

Where can I find the documentation?

You can find the documentation.pdf within the ZIP file you use for installing it on WordPress

Does it work with WooCommerce?

After digging around a lot with WooCommerce I’ve found that the “Product rich snippet” is already included there. But I do not know how to activate this. So please ask the Woo Staff how to do this. If you don’t want to use the WooCommerce built in product schema you have to rename the shortcode to something else then “Product” because it seems that WooCommerce uses this shortcode as well.

Can I use the shortcodes in product excerpts of WooCommerce?

Yes. Please follow these steps here: Allow shortcodes in product excerpts.

Does it work with WPML?

I’ve checked the plugin with the WPML plugin and it works with the latest version (2.6.1) and String Translation Plugin (v. 1.5.1). Even on my testsite. To activate the functionality you have to translate all shortcodes on your own. I’ve found a help page on wpml.org that maybe helps you out. The hint is that you have to make the shortcodes page type translatable.

How long will it take until my the microdata will show up in search results?

Unfortunately, there is no official statement. But it is obvious that Google has to crawl your site first. When the Rich Snippet Testing Tool shows your microdata as you want them to display it, it will appear in the search results after a few days. But there is still no guarantee.

Does this plugin allow users to rate?

No. This is not a rating plugin. However you can make a rich snippet that allows you to rate things yourself. So for example if you write a product review you can add a review-rating yourself.