What you need to know about Rich Snippets and how to get them

What are Rich Snippets?

It used to be so that you could get stars displayed in Google results by simply adding a piece of code to your webshop.  This piece of code is called a “Rich Snippet”. Rich snippets aren’t just for stars, there are rich snippets for all kinds of things. Think of events, products, company information, reviews, etc. The purpose of Google with rich snippets is to supplement the subject of a specific page in an accessible way for search engines. You can provide a product page with information about the product such as the price and stock of the product. This information is then displayed in the search results.

(For example: a website with cooking recipes can provide the page with the preparation time of a recipe and how other visitors rated the recipe by means of a rich snippet. The rich snippets are therefore specifically intended to provide the subject of a relevant page with additional information.)

Is it still useful to put a rich snippet code on my webshop?

Absolutely! While you won’t get any more stars from it in Google, it still has some use. With rich snippets other search engines, such as Bing, can still index the stars and you help Google understand where to find reviews about your company. This allows you to still get stars in other places such as in the ‘Google Business’ results that often appear when you search for your company name.

So, by activating the option “rich snippets via the TrustProfile sidebar” (explained below), review information is structurally transmitted to search engines such as Google. Google just no longer uses this information for star display. It remains useful to activate this option, as other search engines can still display stars and Google can use the information within its algorithm!

When will stars still appear in the search results?

There are still possibilities to get stars in the search results, but the stars must really be about the subject of the page. For example, if you have collected reviews for a certain product and display them on your website, this product still has a chance* of stars. The member page at TrustProfile will also continue to display stars in the search results, because we display reviews about you on one of our sites.

(heavily dependant on algorithms from Google*)

How do you get the rich snippets on your webshop?

You can easily activate the rich snippets via the Sidebar / Javascript integration. If you already have the sidebar active, you can easily activate the rich snippet integration with the following steps:

• Login to the dashboard with your personal login
• Click Promotion in the menu and choose Sidebar
• Find the heading ”RICH SNIPPET VIA JSON-LD” and check the box “Enable rich snippet”
• Click on Save

The rich snippet code is now active. On pages again our rich snippet code can conflict with, for example, the rich snippet code of your product reviews, our rich snippet code is not loaded.

Conflicting Code Detection

You do not have to worry that our sidebar will cause conflicts with, for example, product reviews on a product page. The sidebar itself automatically detects whether there is already a conflicting code on the page. If that is the case, the sidebar will not load rich snippet code and the code already present on your webshop is leading.

Alternatives to installation

An alternative is to place the rich snippets via one of our modules. For example, you can activate the rich snippet code via our TrustProfile modules for Magento, Opencart, Prestashop, WordPress and Shop page via our module and it will then appear on your webshop with an HTML code.

If for some reason you do not want to use our sidebar or modules, you can also place the rich snippet code manually via HTML. Although we advise against this method, you will find the correct HTML code in the TrustProfile dashboard. We do not recommend this method, because every time you get a review the static HTML code becomes outdated and you have to periodically update it manually.

Test the correct placement of the Rich Snippet code

To test the correct operation you can use the Rich Results test from Google.

1. Enter the URL of the page you want to test (for example http://www.trustprofile.io or http://www.trustprofile.io/product) in the “URL” field.
2. Click on “TEST URL”
3. When you see green text with a green check mark (Page is eligible for rich results), everything is set correctly.