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Call it the end of a long, really long story, or the beginning of a whole new chapter! The search engine giant Google has indicated that it will have an all new search snippet in its mobile search result page starting today where it will show a website’s site name and its breadcrumb instead of the site’s URLs in the search results.
Google today announced on its official blog that starting today they will be replacing the website’s URLs with the site’s real-world name instead of its URLs or domain name. Google will also show the URL structure of the site in a breadcrumb-fashioned format.
Introduction of support for schema.org structured data
Along with the update to its mobile SERP snippet, Google also introduced support for schema.org structured data for websites. This will allow webmasters to feed website’s site name and breadcrumb data in an easier and effective way.
How to use new schema.org markup to show your site name and breadcrumb in Google SERP?
If you are wondering how to get started with all this newly introduced schema.org markup, here’s a set of quick tips to get you started!
Choosing preferred site name for structured data in SERP
The newly introduced structured data markup allows you to indicate the preferred name you want Google to display in Search results. You can also feed more than one possible site name for your website and let Google choose between them and when Google completes crawling and indexing your updated page, it can then use the provided name in Search results.
Site name requirements
Google has laid down following set of requirements for you to choose your preferred site name:
Your preferred site name should be:
- Similar to your domain name
- A natural, logical name used to refer to the site, such as “Google,” rather than “Google, Inc.“
- Unique to your site, must not have been used by other site
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Matching your site description and shouldn’t be a misleading one.
Requirements to implement the markup
To get Google recognize your site name markup, make sure you follow below implementation guide:
- Use schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD, RDFa, or microdata format
- Implement and publish the markup on the home page of your official website
- Do not block pages with markup using the Robots Exclusion Protocol
- Include a WebSite item in your markup using the relevant properties:
- url = the URL of your official website (mendatory)
- name = the preferred name of your website (mendatory)
- alternateName = an alternate name you want Google to consider (optional)
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Testing and publishing your markup
It’s always good idea to test your code before-hand, prior to publishing it live. Once you’ve followed and implement this guide, verify that the markup you have added is at par with Google’s recommended format and is accessible by Google.
Use Google’s Google Structured Data Testing Tool to test your code.
Copy and paste the HTML source of your just marked-up page (or just the <script> block) into the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. The validator will tell you if your markup is good, or has any issues like incorrect syntax.
Getting your site result updated in SERP
Once you have published the markup, Google will start processing the site name when it’s indexing algorithm will crawl your site next time. You can keep checking your site name in Google search by making random searches on Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Tips to troubleshoot your markup
Google showing wrong site name in SERP
In case if Google is displaying a site name that you don’t like for your website, re-check your markup code using the structured data testing tool and make sure that your homepage contains markup that specifies a suitable name. In most cases, if markup is specified, the name displayed will either be the name you provide, or your domain name.
Google not showing a site name at all in SERP
In case if Google is not showing up any site name for your website in SERP, use the structured data testing tool to check if your homepage contains markup that specifies your preferred name. Please note that Google may take some time to index your code to update your website name in Search results. In most cases, if markup is specified, the name we show will either be the name you provide, or we will fall back to the regular domain name.
You can also ask Google to re-crawl your URLs if you don’t see a change to presentation of your site in Google SERP after some weeks.
About the author:
Moin Shaikh is a social media manager, webmaster and web analyst for an Australia based IT firm – Intesols. I look after design, development and promotion parts of website. I also contribute for Mozilla Firefox. love to blog and tweet often! Connect with me @moingshaikh
