Impact of Structured Data on Ranking

Posted On : April 3rd, 2018   By : Diptimayee Mohanty   To : Technical SEO

For quite some time now, it’s been a talk in the SEO industry as well as confusion amongst webmasters regarding the impact of structured data on Google ranking.

Previously, Google’s John Mueller confirmed that “Structured Data doesn’t have any impact on Google Ranking”.

But recently, John was asked about the same in his Reddit AMA thread. Read his answer below.

This answer makes everyone confused.

So, let’s not get confused here too and make this simple.

Structured data is not a separate ranking factor but it helps the page to get rank for relevant keywords.

So, if a page has structured data, it doesn’t mean that it’ll get additional ranking weightage. But it helps indirectly.

Google will understand the content of the page in a better way. And due to structured presentation, information within it is accurately processed & indexed by Google & when a user searches for information relevant to the information presented in that page or happened to be included in the structured data, it has a better chance to come up in the search results as Google is 100% sure that the page has relevant data to that query.

But, there is no generic ranking boost for a page over other pages just because structured data used on that page.

John clarified this in Twitter while replying to Glenn Gabe.

There’s no generic ranking boost for SD usage. That’s the same as far as I remember. However, SD can make it easier to understand what the page is about, which can make it easier to show where it’s relevant (improves targeting, maybe ranking for the right terms). (not new, imo)

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) April 2, 2018

Additional tips

Webmasters should know that Google loves structured data and suggests webmasters to use it.

Google has launched a bunch of things that rely on structured data – badges on image search, jobs, restaurants, movies, etc. They are planning to launch more things that rely on structured data.

“Google loves structured data”@methode #Pubcon

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) February 21, 2018

Do what @methode says – structured data. #pubcon pic.twitter.com/13iUmr2s0y

— Melissa Fach (@SEOAware) February 21, 2018

Also Dillip Kumar Mohanty, in his latest blog post covered that “Google experts have stated that Structured Data Markup has no impact on Google Ranking but, it’s definitely a supportive factor in overall SEO improvement”.

So, use structured data as frequently as possible but don’t be obsessive with it. Wrong implementation or spamming may affect negatively.

And remember that results with rich snippets in SERP has higher chances of receiving more clicks.