Google is expanding the eligibility for enhanced product experiences in Google Search to those who use Product structured data and also has added new Search Console reports to measure the performance and identify issues with your structured data. “These enhanced product experiences were previously only open to Merchant Center users,” the search company said.
Expanded eligibility for enhanced product experiences. Google has expanded eligibility for websites that implement Product structured data. Google said now there are two broad categories of search experiences for products and e-commerce sites, they include:
(1) Merchant listing experiences for web pages that allow shoppers to buy a product on the site.
(2) Product snippets for a broader set of web pages with product information. This includes pages that sell products, publish product reviews, and/or aggregate information from other sites.
Previously you needed a Merchant Center account. Google said that previously product snippets in Google search results were primarily powered by schema.org Product structured data, and merchant listing experiences were primarily powered by product details supplied via a Google Merchant Center feed. That is no longer the case, now merchants can be eligible for merchant listing experiences by providing product data on web pages without a Google Merchant Center account.
New Search Console reports. Google also added two new Search Console reports, a merchant listing report and a product snippets report. These reports show you the performance of your product listings and also help you identify areas to fix with your product structured data.
New Merchant listings report. The new merchant center report does three things:
(1) Identifies structured data issues for free listing experiences in search results.
(2) Relevant to pages that sell products.
(2) Covers the wider range of schema.org structured data properties and types used by the Product type that are now supported for advanced cases, such as apparel sizing and energy efficiency ratings.
New product rich results report. The new product rich results report does three things:
(1) Identifies structured data issues for product snippets in search results.
(2) Relevant to pages that share product review information or aggregate product data from multiple sites. Note that pages selling products may also include product reviews.
(3) Replaces the previous Product structured data report with adjustments related to the separation of merchant listing validations into a dedicated report. The history of prior validation errors is retained in this report.
What are these product experiences. Google illustrated two examples of what these enhanced product experiences are:
(1) Merchant listing experiences offer enhanced experiences including the Shopping Knowledge panel and Popular Products, as well as shopping experiences in Google Images and Google Lens. The structured data required for merchant listings and product snippets is described in our Product structured data documentation.
(2) Product rich result snippets:
Why we care. If you sell products and do not use Google Merchant Center, you products may now show up in more places, in a more rich way, than before. Just make sure to use product structured data and/or Merchant Center to benefit from this.
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