Rich Snippets not working (and working at the same time?)

Question

We have an eCommerce site, and we have had rich snippets implemented (in JSON-LD) since January/February this year (2015). I have read multiple sources (including the Google documentation) and there seem to be three possibilities why they are not showing:

• Not enough time has passed (4-12 weeks seems to be the common time quoted)
• The markup is wrong
• Google have decided not to show the data

I can rule out the first given the amount of time. The second I am fairly confident is not the case as I have used multiple testing tools. As for the third … well that's anyone's guess (although the study here suggests that MOST shops should be successful).

A strange note is that the rich snippets do not show on a regular search for our ranking keywords (we rank #1 for a few and page 1 for the majority). However the rich snippets DO show when we search for a ranking keyword + site:www.fridgefreezerdirect.co.uk as show here:

I have done this in an incognito window in the browser and using a VPN with the same results.

Can anyone suggest anything we can do or reasons this may be?

Answer 1

We have been having very similar issues with our website. As with yours we have waited above that time period (6 months in fact), and all the testing tools show the markup as valid.

The third bullet point is most likely the issue. The reasons Google outline are (in the form of answering a question):

" Q: Why doesn't my site show rich snippets? I added everything and the test tool shows it's ok.

A: Google does not guarantee that Rich Snippets will show up for search results from a particular site even if structured data is marked up and can be extracted successfully according to the testing tool. Here are some reasons that marked-up pages might not be shown with Rich Snippets: - The marked-up structured data is not representative of the main content of the page or potentially misleading. - Marked-up data is incorrect in a way that the testing tool was not able to catch. - Marked-up content is hidden from the user. - The site has very few pages (or very few pages with marked-up structured data) and may not be picked up by Google's Rich Snippets system."

(Source - http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-rich-snippets#noshow)

Assuming you don't make any of those mistakes, the Google algorithm has just decided to not show your markup. The appearance of the rich snippets when using the site: operator also suggests this. When using the site: operator, it doesn't actually factor the Google algorithm when generating and displaying the results. Therefore if your rich snippets are showing with the site: operator, then the search engine can pick up the rich snippets but the algorithm is preventing them from showing.

Unfortunately, unless you have a manual action in your Webmaster Tools (now Search Console) about the rich snippets, you can't do anything more directly to try and rectify the situation unless the algorithm changes. You can try reaching out on the Google Product Forums to see if you can get someone there to have a look at it.