During a Question and Answer segment in a hangout, one SEO professional asked John Mueller about incorrect structured data.
They are seeing competitors showing up in the search results with aggregate rating, along with high-price, low-price rich results. And this is used on e-commerce product category pages.
Based on Google documentation,it looks like this is not an improved use case.
They wanted to check and verify that – if they are understanding the documentation correctly – that this is something that they should be working on also.
John explained that yeah, unfortunately, not everyone implements things the way that they have in Google documentation.
Whether this is on purpose, that they are doing things in ways that don’t follow the documentation guidelines, or by mistake, it’s hard to tell.
However, John urges that you should always do your best to follow Google’s documentation guidelines when trying to implement these features, such as structured data for category pages.
This happens at approximately the 33:15 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 33:15
We’re seeing competitors showing up in search results with aggregate rating and high-price, low-price rich results used on ecommerce product category pages. Based on the documentation, it looks like this is not an improved use case. So I wanted to check and verify if I’m understanding the documentation correctly, and if this is something that we should be working on as well.
John (Answer) 33:40
Yeah, unfortunately, not everyone implements things the way that we have it documented, whether that’s on purpose, that they’re doing things in ways that we don’t want them to do, or whether it’s accidentally just implemented incorrectly. It’s sometimes hard to tell. But if you’re looking at the documentation, and it’s clear to you how you should be doing it, then I would try to do it that way. And not kind of the way that we say not to use it. So especially for category pages, I think our guidance is still that you should not be using this kind of structured data there, because it’s not the same product. It’s a bunch of different products. So I would try to avoid that.
