structured data what you need to be doing now - tips from ebay classifieds head of seo
DESCRIPTION
Smx West 2014 Session #Smx #32A - Structured Data Super Session - What You Need To Be Doing Now presentation Google Got The Wrong Business Unit In Disney To Associate With The Listing. By Frank Cheng Of Ebay ClassifiedsTRANSCRIPT
eBay Inc. confidential 1
Structured Data
Frank Cheng
Head of SEO, Global Platform
SMX West 2014
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Agenda
• WHO am I?
• WHY is structured data important?
• WHAT did we do?
• WHEN and WHERE did we do it?
• HOW has it performed?
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WE HAVE BUILT THE WORLD’S LARGEST CLASSIFIEDS BUSINESS
ECG GLOBAL FOOTPRINT
MINORITY INVESTMENTS
2005
2004
2005
2005
2008 2011
GLOBAL
UNIQUE VISITORS
PAGE VIEWS A
MONTH
23 COUNTRIES
TOTAL
LIVE
ADS
18.3M
100M
6B
VIBRANT
MOTORSBUSINESS
We make a difference in the life of 100M people, enabling them to
find the house, job, car or product they need
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Structured data has become more important with the new Google
“Hummingbird” algorithm
“Google said that Hummingbird
is paying more attention to each
word in a query, ensuring that
the whole query — the whole
sentence or conversation or
meaning — is taken into
account, rather than particular
words. The goal is that pages
matching the meaning do
better, rather than pages
matching just a few words.”
~ Danny Sullivan
Creative Commons Photo by s p e x
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Steps to markup your site with structured data
1. Go through http://schema.org/docs/full.html to identify potential
schema.org item types and properties available / relevant to your site
2. Go through all categories, attributes and information elements on your site
and map them to relevant markup items
3. Modify original HTML to include markup item code
4. Successful implementation can be tested using Google tool:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
5. For breadcrumb mark-up, use Microdata format instead, outlined at
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417
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Different categories and attributes should be mapped to the most
relevant schema.org data types and properties
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After the launch, we have seen # of items and # of pages with
structured data items increase by 300%
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Crawlers also responded positively to the change by crawling
more pages and downloading more content from our site
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As a result, we have seen more pages indexed on Google
0
500,000
1,000,000
1,500,000
2,000,000
2,500,000
3,000,000
Pre Post
# of URLs indexed by Google for page type A
57%
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SEO traffic increased between 150% and 200% for page type A
-50%
0%
50%
100%
150%
200%
250%
300%
7-N
ov-
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2-F
eb
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SEO Traffic Growth by Category
AUTOS
ELECTRONICS
FASHION
HOME & GARDEN
PROPERTY
SERVICES
JOBS
* Other SEO improvements also launched with the same release that may have also impacted traffic for page type A
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SERP rich snippets and Google Knowledge Graph are applications
of how Google use the data and could provide traffic opportunities
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Takeaways
• Easy to implement, but hard to get everything right in the first
implementation, especially for mega sites with complex category
structure and attribute data scheme
• Main benefits came from
– Crawlability: More pages being indexed and crawled
– CTR: More clicks generated from the same SERP positions
• Be ready for the future – Conversational search, entity search…etc
Frank Cheng
Head of SEO, Global Platform
eBay Classifieds Group, eBay Inc.