I recently discovered that several of my blog posts reviewing certain services had lost their rich snippet feature in Google’s index. Rich snippets give an important edge to help your indexed pages stand out from other results. They feature a little visual flair to catch the attention of searchers. In the case of review rich snippets, a star rating with the author’s name is displayed below title tag and URL, and above the meta description.
At first, I thought the WordPress plugin I was using to generate the rich snippets was to blame. After all, schema markup can be complicated and if Google doesn’t successfully validate that markup, they can choose not to display the rich snippet. However, as I discovered, it was actually a theme update I did a while back that caused a conflict in the schema markup. As much as I love this theme, the authors decided to haphazardly implement a broken schema which did not play nice with the plugin I was using. After editing the template files to remove this code, my schema (and rich snippets) were functioning properly.
I quickly resubmitted all affected pages and fortunately, the plain-looking indexed results had their flair back. What came next was a bit of a pleasant surprise. It happened so quickly that I can only attribute it to the rich snippet appearing again.
The Return of a Rich Snippet Boosted My Ranking
I’ve been trying to rank this page for the terms SE Ranking, Seranking, and SE Ranking Review. A couple months ago I was inching closer to the top 10 for Se Ranking Review. I believe I reached position #18 at one point. It didn’t last long as all of those terms soon plummeted. I chalked it up to losing some backlinks. But maybe I was wrong? Look at the rankings from the last few days.
After re-enabling rich snippets, there were some modest gains
There is a significant jump from position #92 to #51 for Seranking. The other two terms didn’t increase in ranking as dramatically, but this can be expected the closer you get to #1. Even more impressive is the fact that the rankings for Sept. 17th were already tallied previously. If I recall, they weren’t much different than the previous two days.
When I fixed my rich snippet problem, I used the fetch as google tool in hopes that it would quickly return that review schema to my targeted page. It worked. After I verified this, I then re-ran the keyword checking for the 17th which is the results you see above.
I never believed that rich snippets affected SEO. I do know that since they stand out, click-thru-ratio would increase. Of course, this is just one instance where it appears that it DOES affect SEO. I can’t say for certain if this is natural, or perhaps regaining a little bit of that lost juice from before. Whatever the cause, make sure you verify your own rich snippets are working from time to time!
