John Mueller Answers About Structured Data and Rankings via @martinibuster

What is interesting about his answer is that he mentioned that Google uses structured data information to better understand the entities on a page.

An entity are basically like nouns. So if you are reviewing a book, your structured data can communicate the book title, author and so on in a convenient way so that Google can better understand the entity on that page, which is the book. (See Bill Slawski’s article, Search Engines and Entities for a comprehensive overview of the topic)

This is what Mueller answered:

“With regard to using structured data in general for ranking, I think that’s kind of tricky.

So, on the one hand we do use structured data to better understand the entities on a page and to find out where that page is more relevant.”

That’s actually pretty good information. It aligns with the most basic and fundamental benefit of search engine optimization, which is to make your content easy for search engines to crawl and understand.

That’s not a ranking factor type boost for rankings though. It just gives you the ability to communicate the substance of your content in an efficient manner.

John Mueller goes on to explain why this isn’t a ranking related factor:

“But that doesn’t mean that just because people are doing things in a technically correct way on a website that that page is a better page than it would be otherwise.

So we will try to use that to show it in more relevant search results that would perhaps bring more users to your pages that actually match the topics of your pages.

But it doesn’t mean that we would show it to more users or that it would rank better.”