One SEO professional asked John Mueller during the submitted Question and Answer segment of a hangout about selling seasonal products on their website.
The SEO pro explained: among other activities, their client sells bakery products on an e-commerce store.
Many of these products have a seasonal flair, for example one product might be for St. Patrick’s Day.
When their product is in season, they would like to see it indexed, and if possible, ranked in a prominent position.
When they went to test and submit the product URL for indexing, they did not have a field aggregate ranking or review, and both of these are considered optional Schema fields.
Because of this, they get a yellow warning.
In other words, the page can be crawled but not submitted, indexed, or ranked. It seems like an optional Schema field should allow the page to be indexed. Would you agree?
John answered that yes, the page can definitely be indexed. Even if some of the structured data markup is wrong, the page can be indexed.
This is true even if the HTML itself is entirely broken.
Just because the structured data is not complete, or not optimal, this would not block indexing.
That’s the first step there.
The other part, John believes, is something that’s useful to look at, specifically for e-commerce sites.
It’s very helpful for Google to understand what you, the site owner, would consider to be important across a website.
This means when Google looks at a site, if the site owner shows Google what they believe to be important across a website, as visibly as possible, then it’s easier for Google to pick that up.
This means that, when Google looks at something like the homepage of a site, or whatever the most important pages from the website are, let Google know about what they consider to be important and linked to in a way that’s prominent.
For something like a St. Patrick’s Day cake, this is something where when Google is looking at the home page, they should be able to see that this is really a seasonal thing. And that this is really important for you. And that they find direct links from the homepage to that specific product.
When John looked at the specific example there with St. Patrick’s Day cakes – if you look at the homepage of the site, it’s not mentioned anywhere.
And even in the next level from that homepage, St. Patrick’s Day cake is not visibly linked anywhere.
This means that for Google, when they look at this website overall, even if they see this specific product being mentioned in a sitemap file, it looks like some random product that just happened to show up in the e-commerce site.
Google doesn’t realize that actually, this is something that is really important to you and that you would like to have treated prominently in the search results.
In cases like this, where you have some kind of event happening, John recommends that you’re visibly linking directly to that from the home page, and that you include some of the aspects in the homepage also.
Thus, even if they only reindex and reprocess your homepage, Google already knows that there’s some information there that they can pick up on.
This happens at approximately the 31:45 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 31:45
Among other activities, my client sells bakery products on an e-commerce site, many of these have a seasonal flair, for example, St. Patrick’s Day. When their product is in season, they would like to see it indexed, and if possible, ranked prominently. When we went to test and submit the product URL for indexing, they didn’t have a field aggregate ranking or review, both of which are considered optional by schema fields. Because of this, they get a yellow warning. In other words, the page can be crawled but not submitted, indexed or ranked. It seems like an optional schema field should allow the page to be indexed, would you agree? And then it has an example there.
John (Answer) 32:24
So the page can definitely be indexed. Even if some of the structured data markup is wrong. The page can be indexed, even if the HTML itself is completely broken. So just purely because the structured data is not complete, or not optimal, would not block indexing. So that’s kind of the first step here. The other part, I think, is something that is useful to look at specifically for e-commerce sites.
In that, it’s very helpful for us to understand what you would consider to be important across a website. That means when we look at a website, if you show us as visibly as possible, like what you think is critical here, then it’s easier for us to pick that up. From a practical point of view, that means when we look at something like the homepage of a website, or whatever the most important pages from the website, like, let us know about what you consider to be important and link to that prominently.
So for something like a St. Patrick’s cake, St. Patrick’s Day cake. That’s something where when we look at the homepage, we should be able to see that this is actually a seasonal thing. And this is really important for you. And that we find direct links from the homepage to that specific product. When I looked at this specific example here, I found, I mean, the page is linked here with that specific St. Patrick’s Day cake.
But when you look at the homepage of the site, it’s not mentioned anywhere. And even kind of like the next level in from that website, you don’t see that this cake is visibly linked somewhere. That means for us when we look at this website overall, even if we see this specific product being mentioned in a sitemap file, it looks like some random product that just happened to show up in the e-commerce site.
We don’t realize that actually, this is something that is really important to you and that you would like to have treated kind of prominently in the search results. So what I would do in cases like this, where you have, especially some time-limited event happening, is make sure that you’re really visibly linking to that from the homepage, that you include some of the aspects in the homepage as well.
So that even if we only reindex and reprocess your homepage, we already know that there’s some information there that we can pick up on. So if you have a St. Patrick’s Day cake, for example, and you mentioned it on your homepage, and we only update your homepage, for whatever reason, then if someone searches for St. Patrick’s Day cake, then we will at least know your homepage could be relevant for that query.
And ideally, if it’s linked directly from the homepage, then we can pick up that product as well and see, well, this is a really important product for this website. And probably we can process it a little bit faster than we could some random other products that you happen to update on a website. So essentially, with internal linking, you can give us a lot of information about what you care about across a website.
And for for large part, our algorithms will try to follow that. It’s not that they will make a judgment call on their own, it’s more that they look at your site, and they realize, oh, this person says this is really important. So we will kind of give it a little bit more weight. And what you consider important is totally up to you. It might be something seasonal, it might be something that you sell really well.
It might be something where you make the most money out of or something where the competitive environment is particularly strong, and you want to get a foothold in there. All of that is totally up to you. But make it as clear as possible. When we look at your website, especially your homepage, especially the more important pages on the site, what you want kind of to be treated in the foreground when it comes to search.
