Schema.org Microformat Not Included in Search Results

Question

For the past few months I've been trying to integrate the schema.org microformat into my restaurant review site so that my Google search results for a restaurant will contain rich markup such as the star ratings, average price, etc.. However, these efforts have completely failed. The Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool says that my pages are marked up completely and even shows the correct rich markup search snippet. But for some reason the real-world search snippets don't even come close to matching. I've contacted Google a few times over the past few month but they have never gotten back to me. I've even gone as far as trying to emulate Yelp's markup but even that has failed. Does anyone know what's going on?

Here is an example of a restaurant page: http://peepmeat.com/restaurant.php?id=88
Here is that page in the Rich Snippet Testing Tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpeepmeat.com%2Frestaurant.php%3Fid%3D88
And here is a Google search for the page: https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=peepmeat+Bonnie's+Grill

From that page: "Note that there is no guarantee that a Rich Snippet will be shown for this page on actual search results. For more details, see the FAQ." Right now it seems that sites are manually approved to some degree. I suspect a combo of age, relevance, manually review etc is needed for them to show up. — Rich Bradshaw, Sep 17 '12 at 21:14
Rich, can you repost your comment as an answer. I have a feeling that you may be correct. The site has a very low search ranking and traffic ranking so maybe I'm being penalized. Of course to me this seems like a chicken and the egg problem. I wanted to increase the visibility of my search result so that I received more traffic. — YoungDinosaur, Sep 18 '12 at 14:55
There's a Google page where you can report this. No guarantees of a fix, but it seems they're interested in ironing out kinks: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/request.py?&contact_type=rich_snippets_feedback — GDVS, Oct 06 '12 at 13:20

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 19 '12 at 07:22

From that page:

"Note that there is no guarantee that a Rich Snippet will be shown for this page on actual search results. For more details, see the FAQ."

Right now it seems that sites are manually approved to some degree. I suspect a combo of age, relevance, manually review etc is needed for them to show up.

This isn't that surprising, as otherwise sites could just put whatever markup they felt like, and Google would misrepresent them in their SERPs.

I wouldn't say you are being penalised by the way – this isn't a negative force suppressing your site, but a threshold you need to reach to be eligible.

The site has very low traffic so this is most likely the answer. — YoungDinosaur, Oct 09 '12 at 15:02

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 18 '12 at 07:55

0

We have been successful with the following code:

<div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
<span itemprop="ratingValue">9.875</span>/<span itemprop="bestRating">10</span> based on <span itemprop="ratingCount">5</span> reviews

Note the bestRating value, however as previously mentioned showing up on the results is not guaranteed

answered Sep 18 '12 at 07:55

user972848

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I'll add the bestRating but I'm beginning to think that Rich is correct. – YoungDinosaur Sep 18 '12 at 14:53

Schema.org Microformat Not Included in Search Results

2 Answers2