Understanding Google Rich Snippet

Question

I googled Top 10 Songs and it returned me a rich snippet of 10 songs from Top10 website. Digging further, the website had a list of exact same songs which google displayed in their Rich snippet.

Reading about Rich Snippet SEO, I got to know that we need to markup our data to qualify for Rich snippet card. Looking into the source of Top10 website, I found out that it didnt had schema.org/og definition that would mark their site up. To backup my claim, I checked the same on Google Structure Data Testing Tool and, as expected, it returned nothing.

I want to know how google is displaying the data on the Rich Snippet card. PS:- I read somewhere Google does not use their Knowledge Graph for Rich Snippet.

Please find the attached screenshot of the rich snippet.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about SEO. — Bill the Lizard, Sep 28 '16 at 19:31
It was never about SEO. If you've read the comments, I'm creating a project which will crawl the web smartly. Hence, wanted to know how GoogleBot crawls the web 'smartly'. — Praful Bagai, Sep 29 '16 at 03:57

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 27 '16 at 15:12

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That is likely a featured snippet (not a rich snippet, nor a rich result, as they are called now).

Google Search extracts the information from the webpage.

You can’t directly influence that such a featured snippet gets shown for your result:

How can I mark my page as a featured snippet?

You can't. Google programmatically determines that a page contains a likely answer to the user's question, and displays the result as a featured snippet.

answered Sep 27 '16 at 15:12

unor

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Thanks @unor for the response. I want to know how google is extracting this data from a website which is not marked-up properly. Does google "scrape" it or intelligently crawls it? How does GoogleBot extracts only the 'relevant' information from the page. – Praful Bagai Sep 28 '16 at 07:35
I want to write a crawler for a project. I just dont want to scrape the websites. I want to write a crawler where it extracts the relevant information on its own. – Praful Bagai Sep 28 '16 at 07:36
@PythonEnthusiast: Google doesn’t document publicly how they do it. -- I’d say they crawl the page, learn what it’s primarily about, and extract the relevant information (in this case, the list) by parsing the HTML. Not different to everything else they do (extracting a snippet description if they don’t use `meta`-`description`; rephrasing the title if they are not happy with `title`; etc.). – unor Sep 28 '16 at 12:38

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 20 '21 at 02:55

What you see on top of organic result results is not Rich Snippet. A rich snippet is just a rich result. Rich snippet provides more graphical elements like rating stars, recipe cooking time, calory count, thumbnails etc. Rich snippets are generally more visually appealing. For example, I wanted to know the best recipe for chicken broth and googled to search for the same. Google will show me a list of rich snippets (like below) if the ranked pages are with structured code added for recipes.

rich snippet pic from learnly.info

Featured snippets often show up for some of the most competitive queries. Google's automated systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet to highlight for a specific search request. This is not something we can control using structured codes. There are ways to opt out if you don't want your content from your pages to be displayed as a featured snippet.

References for this answer: rich snippet guide by learnly.info

Understanding Google Rich Snippet

2 Answers2