An article that came out at the beginning of 2015 was intended to (quietly) let people know about what Google had been doing to offer a new form of search results called Table Search. The article was titled Applying WebTables in Practice (pdf).
It tells us about an initiative that Google's structured data team embarked upon, when they started the WebTables project in the second half of the 2000s, which involved them releasing the following paper:
WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web (pdf)
It got some nice press in the paper Structured Data on the Web (pdf).
What is Table Search?
There are many pages on the Web that are filled with data in the form of tables. It's possible that if you weren't paying attention you may have missed Google Table Search entirely—it hasn't gotten a lot of press as far as I can tell. If you include tabular data on the pages of your site, though, you may be able to find tables from your site included in the results from a query in Google Table Search.
Imagine that I am looking to buy a new camera lens, except I'm not sure which one to purchase. I've heard good things about Nikon lenses, so I go to Table Search and look for [ single lens dslr nikon]. The first table returned gives me some choices to compare different lenses:
Table Search and structured snippets
One of the interesting things to grow out of Table Search capability from Google is the structured snippet, a search result that is a combination of query results and tabular data results, as described by Google in their blog post Introducing Structured Snippets, now a part of Google Web Search.
For example, this result involving a search for [superman] includes facts from a Wikipedia table about the character:
Those extra facts come from the table associated with a query on Superman that shows tabular data about the character:
We can see Google working in structured snippets elsewhere, e.g., in presenting snippets from Twitter, like from the following profile:
A search for Rand shows the following (h/t to Barbara Starr for this example of a structured snippet):
Note how Google is taking structured data (highlighted in yellow) from the Twitter profile and including it in the Google search result from the Twitter profile "about Rand". That data may also be from Twitter's API of data that they feed to Google. I have noticed that when there are multiple Twitter accounts for the same name, this kind of table data doesn't appear in the Google snippet.
Getting your structured snippets
The Applying Webtables in Practice paper has some suggestions on how to create tables that might be sources of structured data that Google might use:
- Limit the amount of boilerplate content that appears in a table
- Use table headings <th> to add labels to the columns they head—this tells Google that they are filled with important data
- Use meaningful attribute names in table headings that make it more likely the tables might appear and rank for a relevant query
- Use meaningful titles, captions and semantically related text surrounding the table. These can help the search engine better understand what the table is about.
- The ranking of tables in Table Search can be influenced by Web ranking features such as The PageRank of a page a table is on and links pointed to that page.
If you decide to use tables on your pages, following these hints from the "Applying WebTables in Practice" paper may help lead to structured snippets showing up in your search results. The inclusion of that data may convince searchers to click through to your pages. A data-rich search result that addresses their informational and situational needs may be persuasive enough to get them to visit you. And the snippet is attached to a link to your page, so your page gets credit for the data.
Thanks Bill! Another master piece from your end. You have mentioned that we need to include <th> as table heading in order to make Google bots understand the importance of information inside a particular table that you want it to fetch as search snippet. By doing that, we cannot be sure of getting those in search snippet or can we be? The web table is currently in experimental phase as mentioned on the webpage. So it would really be interesting to see how this would shape up the future of search snippet and what's the fate of meta description which searchers struggle to achieve for better CTR. I would be looking for other veterans comments in this blog to learn more. Thanks!
Hi Amit,
The paper on Webtables in Practice points out how to make the structured data on you pagesw more understandable to a search engine, including the use of table headings for rows. Adding those may not guarantee that your search snippets will be filled with facts, but doing something like that makes it more possible.
Thanks Bill. It was great to see, to be able to export data in spreadsheet.
Same as Twitter, Facebook data (no. of likes and talking about this) is also there in search result (Narendra Modi).
Attention for all eCommerce store owner. Always put specifications and features in table format.
One question, can this be related to quality of web-page with context of Panda?
Hello Sir,
It's always great to see you on Moz :)
Coming to the post, I'm actually surprised to see this "table" thing from google but it's interesting. So, google is just showing up the table of top result and hiding the others and we have to check them manually. My question is, if I'm searching for some generic and highly competitive queries, like "Coffee recipe" (Link), it's showing me same 2 links of same domain but with different table. Isn't it confusing? Is google still working on this?
Looking for your valuable feedback.
Interesting question Umar, I am also keen for the answer of this question.
Congrats Bill for the knowledgeable article on a very different topic.
Hi Umar,
Google has been working on The WebTables project for over 5 years, but the structured snippet part of it is only months old. and I can't tell you how long Google Table Search ahs been around either. Showing enriched snippets on the basis of tabular data is a fairly new thing to Google - one that they haven't graced with even an announcement about in one of Google's many blogs; interestingly, they haven't officially mentioned their table search in a Google Blog post either. I'm afraid that we are going to see missteps and problems with some of the things that Google reports.The two different tables are from the two different tabbed results on that page. Why Google shows separate entries for each is a little puzzling. A lot of the tables listed are for ecommerce sites - it's definitely worth exploring how table search works, and what it might add to snippets.
Thanks for the details information about Tables and how to use them.
Are we missing the fact that web developers should see this an incentive to make any and every tweak that could help increase their ability to show structured snippets? After all, we know the writing is already on the wall.
We all know that Wikipedia is the poster child for having formatted information in way that pleases Google’s algorithm. I think structured snippets should be on the radar of every design team who’s concerned about SEO. Thanks for a solid update on the topic.
Cheers Bill for Wonderful post, So everyone should prepare their bases for Google table Search.Will this help Small eCommerce sites which only include specific product details?
Well I never heard of TH and the Table thing by Google, seems to me that we still have time to optimize our websites with respect to tables and specifications. This particular feature can be a great advantage for E-Commerce websites.
Great post! I recently helped one of my clients implement content in table format to gain structured snippets.
Yep, I missed table search entirely alright. Great research, Bill.
Initially, my first impression was that Google's ability to pull data from tables would only be relevant (or helpful) for eCommerce sites that include specific product information in that format. After reading on down the page I was pleasantly surprised to see that this also applies to other platforms which use tables in their layout/design (i.e. Twitter) Will need to give my online profiles another look through to ensure they're are completely optimized for accuracy and hyper-brand specificity. Thanks for posting!
Everything in Online Stores is an obligation to have these fragments. more info on. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en
Very timely & excellent post Bill. I was totally unaware of this feature, as Google is giving more priority to Snippets recently so will going to implement this functionality on my website and will see how it turns out.
It's a great example of where the Semantic Web connects the Web Search. So just confused, Is it possible to get the table in our regular search (without Google table search)?
Thanks for sharing. I have to admit the table search had passed me by. We've got a lot of data at BirdSong like https://www.birdsonganalytics.com/election-2015/ so I need to see how we can make tables work for us.
Hi Bill,
This is something I have been interested in for a long time. I started out looking into table search for methods of improving local SEO & e-commerce.
I ran into this document on Google and would love to hear your thoughts on what is being said in this URL
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/state-of-the-web/2005/tables
That there is a huge value to tables but Google seems to put more emphasis than we had thought. I must use quite a bit of caution when working with developers on sites with large amounts of tables.
Your research spectacular it is exactly what I've been searching for.
https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~michjc/papers/cacm-cafarella-2011.pdf
Up until now I had barely broken the surface of the impact of tables and had known schema would played a part in anything like tables in order for Google to get the most information out of it but the Amount of information in your University of Michigan document is awesome. Combined with everything you have provided I really want to say thank you.
This is one of the most exciting posts I have ever read thank you.
All the best,
Tom
Thank you, Brady!
Hi Gaurav, Using the table schmema markup might call more attention to your table, but the way that the Webtables project was intended to work didn't anticipate or require table schema. It might act like a flag telling Google to pay attention to the table on a page. If you look at the examples of tables, there is one that does have headings marked up as <th> headings at the tops of rows. The way that Google is interpreting table markup is they are treating it as "structured" data on pages they find it on, so there is the potential to get unique and richer snippets without necessarily using schema markup because Google will try to understand your table's markup - that's why I created the list from the tables in practice paper - to get an idea of how to possible get some advantage from using table markup for your data on your pages.
That is very much interesting, I'll dig more on it. Also, I have noticed that Google fetches these info only when the web site/page has a trust value or authority or rank, else Google wont consider taking info from the source and display them on SERP. Thoughts?
Mainly as per my series of experiments with 100's of queries, I have noticed that Google shows information on SERP only for those site which has HIGH Domain Authority, And similarly for rich snippet with site Search bar only appears on SERP for high authority sites and has more searches on site (I believe implementing Schema Search in necessary) Do you thing here things will be the same??
Bill,
That's a great info would love to implement it on my site but wondering if table schema https://schema.org/Table could help it more. If we implement schema table instead of following something that totally depends on what we write in table content then I think it will help Google more to understand content and give better results. right???
Also, if you search "swine symptoms" (without quotes) then also you will see a direct info on SERP without going to any page. When I went to source page and checked the page source I was amazed to see that there were no structured data implemented on site. Can you please help me out why?
Hi Gaurav, Google's patent that describes Direct Answers tells us that it looks for sources from pages that tend to have high click rates in search results for queries related to the natural language question, and also tends to rank well for queries related to the terms in the question. That seems to go well with a higher trust value or authority or rank.
Great post! I was unaware of this thing, thanks for shairng. I will implement on my sites.
Thank you, Bill, really useful!!
Cheers Bill - great to have some tips on tables and tabs. A client of mine sells hardware which can have multiple specifications according to what the client needs, this information is displayed in tables and is quite hard to get Google to split between various specifications in their results. From what I understand, labelling the table will help with this so thank you.
Hello!
Structured data used for the user to get at a glance the keys you need to decide if you are interested click the link or not, as well you indicate in your post.We can not tell google what you have to put, so we have to take certain steps to suggest, for example, placed on tables the details of each of our products, especially if we have an online store.
We therefore welcome the suggestions that can make us as we often do not know how.
I appreciate your post, it is very interesting.
Good timing for this post since Google table search is still in experimental phase, so everyone can prepare on time.
I think i have a correction for your post. You've said that "when there are multiple Twitter accounts for the same name, this kind of table data doesn't appear in the Google snippet." Actually, there are 3 accounts on Twitter with the name Rand Fishkin .
Also, there are multiple accounts on Twitter with the name Nikki Reed. Still, if you search Google for: nikki reed twitter, two accounts with the same name trigger table data. One is verified account, one is not. And even the third account for the same name will trigger table data if you search for: @__NikkiReed.
This third account shows 0 tweets • 0 photos/videos • 6187 followers, which may indicate that number of followers is one of the prerequisite for displaying table data from Twitter (just assumption). However, e.g. Bill Slawski have 18,3k followers, but search for @bill_slawski will not trigger table data. So there are some others prerequisites.
Thanks for doing more research on twitter results, Stelian.
Bill - Very timely post. I had no idea there was such a service as Google Table Search.
I just posted a blog article which included a table. My thought behind using a coded table rather than a screen cap of an Excel spreadsheet was that it would look better from a UI standpoint. And it does.
Nice to see that Google actually picks up on it.
Hello, do you think Google will use this for real estate listings in a region to quickly compare whats out there? Would you recommend implementing this for a real estate search engine?
I believe that this is an interesting implementation of websites' tables. You should definitely run various tests and do some experimentation in Real State. I would said that If value is added for greater user experience in search results, why not?
Great Post as usual Bill Thanks! As per the snippets disappearing it was just a matter of time. The day that people figure out that Google will always pull the plug when user experience is beginning to be compromised!
I can imagine the web devs pulling out their hair since all clients would want to use tables on their websites now.