A couple of days ago I was looking at the Schema.org stuff around the Product Type. Today I’m looking at the ItemList type, for those pages where we have a list of products.

Again, like then, I’ve done a survey. I can be briefer than last time:

  • next.co.uk don’t bother with schema.org on category view pages
  • asos.com also don’t bother.
  • Roman.com have multiple products but not in a list item and they don’t always match the content on the page. The main ones seem to.
  • argos.co.uk just have multiple entries of the Product type and they are all wrong, with the URL where the name should be, and each url and name repeated.
  • nest.co.uk don’t bother.

So, looking at these, I wonder, is it a mistake on their part, lazyness, insufficient return on investment, or, is it actually the right thing to do.

My questions to google don’t get me very far. The question I seem to find plenty of answers to is “How do I implement schema.org on a specific page” but what I can’t see an answer to is “but should I do it on every page the product appear on, or what?!?”

Moz.org say “For best results, experiment with schema markup to see how your audience responds to the resulting rich snippets” - which isn’t useful. But wait, “rich snippets” is that what we’re really talking about here?

Perhaps. Perhaps Google (& the rest) just want nicer looking search results.

In which case I think the idea of doing a list is just going to help with images show in the search results, which is, like really good yeah? It also lets you choose the order in which the products are displayed.

I see that the Dresses with Pockets For Women that Mandy worked on uses the ItemList type, and is doing well in Google.

I shall follow her example.