How to Set up Organization Schema

Google continues to emphasize structured data such as Schema.org markup to help understand a website and associated entities. Structured data’s benefits extend beyond producing rich snippets and are increasingly vital to search engine optimization.

Organization schema is critical to assist Google in knowing more about a business and its knowledge graph.

Google has strict guidelines for just two schema properties: logo and url. Other useful properties include:

• name and alternateName
• address and areaServed (for local businesses)
• contactPoint
• sameAs

Some of these properties impact how your business appears in search. All will help Google understand your business.

Organization Schema Essentials

1. Include name and alternative name

Google recommends schema Organization properties of name and alternativeName, such as a brand. They appear above the title in search snippets. Otherwise, Google displays the domain name.

A company or brand name above a search snippet builds recognition and trust. And including all associated brands in schema markup helps Google understand the overall company setup.

2. Include your logo

Linking the logo property to what’s shown on your site helps Google display the correct image in your knowledge panel. For example, searching for “shopify” produces a knowledge panel with the logo in the top-right.

Remember to update the logo property in your Organization schema after rebrands or redesigns.

Shopify’s logo appears in its knowledge panel, which includes the company’s associated social media channels. Click image to enlarge.

3. Add more sameAs properties

Schema’s sameAs property identifies the external channels managed by your company, such as social media profiles. Google may also include sameAs links in a knowledge panel (as in the Shopify example above), although the logo property is a stronger signal.

4. Description

Google doesn’t offer guidelines on properties such as description and keywords from, respectively, the WebPage and Thing schema types. But both are popular and likely help Google understand the site.

Many third-party tools generate schema markup. Once generated, confirm the accuracy via validators in Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool or Schema.org.

Schema 101

Google supports structured data using JSON-LD code. Schema.org markup of JSON-LD is the most popular form of structured data and is now more or less the industry standard.

Labels in Schema.org can be confusing. “Types” are analogous to categories. “Properties” are like products. There are roughly 800 types and 1,500 properties. Google supports only some of them.

Google offers no instruction on the specific types or properties to deploy other than highlighting their use. A good rule is to include as many as necessary to help Google understand your business. However, avoid unimportant details such as unmaintained profiles, a slogan, or the number of employees. Focus your Organization type on what you want Google to use.

2 (Imperfect) Ways to Block Bard

Generative AI such as Google’s Bard and ChatGPT doesn’t create content from scratch. It repurposes it from original sources.

Valid reasons could prompt a website to prevent AI bots from using its content, including:

• Protect intellectual property. Blocking generative AI could protect unique content, ideas, or products from being copied or reused.

• Misrepresentation. AI answers could misinterpret or misuse content.

• Limited usefulness. AI answers generate little (or no) traffic to the publishers who provide them.

• User control. Blocking AI bots allows creators more control over how and where their content appears online.

Bard represents an added concern: What if Google’s Search Generative Experience uses content for an answer without citing the source, such as your company?

There’s no good solution. I know no method to prevent Bard from using your content without jeopardizing organic search performance.

Nonetheless, Google recommends two ways to block or control Bard.

Use Google-Extended

Bard uses the same user agent as Google Search when collecting data, so blocking it disables Googlebot from crawling your site and collecting relevancy signals.

Google-Extended is the company’s solution. It blocks Bard without affecting Google’s index and ranking algorithm.

To use, add a disallow directive in your site’s robot.text file, as follows:

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

The directive does not stop Google from showing your content in SGE’s answers, with or without citations. Its purpose, per Google, is to prevent SGE from learning from it.

Use Nosnippet, Max-snippet, or Data-nosnippet

SGE will follow Google-approved meta tags and attributes:

• no-snippet meta tag prevents AI answers from showing any parts of your content.

• max-snippet robots meta tag allows creators to set the maximum number of characters AI can include from your content.

• data-nosnippet HTML attribute enables creators to designate any text from an HTML page to be excluded from a search snippet.

All three options could make organic and featured snippets appear weak and less clickable. Thus I don’t recommend them to sites relying on organic search traffic.

Images, which in my testing often appear in SGE’s results, cannot be blocked, according to Google.

Blocking Other AI Bots

New generative AI platforms show up seemingly monthly. Blocking all of them will be difficult. We can block or contorl three non-Google bots:

• Use robots.txt to block GPTbot (ChatGPT) and CCbot (Common Crawl).

• Use both nocache and noarchive meta tags to control Bingbot. The tags will not impact Bing’s organic search rankings, although they will disable Google’s cache and prevent Wayback Machine from archiving pages.

Google’s SITE Operator Is a Top SEO Tool

Google’s site: operator limits search results to a single domain. It is one of the oldest and most helpful tools for search engine optimization.

To use, type site: followed by the desired URL (no space) in Google’s search box — e.g., site:sampledomain.com.

Here are five key SEO tasks with site:.

Using the site: Operator

1. Find internal pages to link to

The site: operator is handy for locating relevant internal pages quickly.

The site: operator locates relevant internal pages quickly. This example searches for “hreflang” articles.

Search optimizers once used the operator to know which pages Google prioritized for any query. But that’s no longer reliable because results for site: are not based on intent, previous searches, or even freshness — as is the case for other queries.

Still, the site: operator typically surfaces a search-optimized page for each query, so I continue using it for internal link options.

2. Locate URLs that shouldn’t be indexed

Google’s Search Console is the best way to identify pages that should and should not be indexed. But it’s not perfect. Sometimes Search Console lists unindexed URLs that are actually indexed. So use Search Console and site: to find indexed pages that should be blocked, redirected, or canonicalized.

Even better, run several site: operators to confirm properly indexed pages, ensuring:

• Tag pages are not indexed: site:domain.com inurl:tag
• Backend, admin pages are not indexed: site:domain.com inurl:admin
• Only https URLs are indexed: site:domain.com inurl:http or site:domain.com -inurl:https 

From there, use Search Console’s URL inspection tool to find the reasons for improper indexation.

A search for site:seosmarty.com -inurl:https includes a minus sign to exclude https pages from the results.

3. Access Google’s cache

Google’s cache shows how the search engine sees all elements of a page. A site: search can access the cache version of a page by clicking the three vertical dots next to the title in the results. The ensuing “More options” pop-up card will also state how long Google has indexed the page.

Access the cached version of a page via a site: search and then clicking the three vertical dots next to the title in the results.

4. Preview a domain’s search snippets

The content of organic search snippets is query-dependent. Depending on the search term, Google may rewrite the page title, extract on-page content instead of the meta description, and display site names instead of URLs.

Still, the site: operator will show:

• Where a snippet is tranсated.
• The page’s publish date, per Google.

Here’s a page preview using the site: operator:

The site: operator can preview search snippets, although the non site: results could differ.

Here’s what it looks like in a typical search. Note the date and the title look the same, but the query-driven snippet below has a different description and site name. It also includes an image.

Normal snippets — without using the site: operator — include an image, among other differences.

5. Find pages to update

Google offers a useful date search option that hides behind the “Tools” link in search results. Choose a date range to find all pages Google indexed during that period. It’s a quick way to find articles to update, especially when publishing a related topic.

Google’s date-search option is behind the “Tools” link in search results.

Browser Extensions

I’m aware of two browser extensions to access the site: operator quickly.

• Search Site WE (Firefox). Highlight any words on a page and right-click. The extension will search for those words on the current domain or subdomain.

• Search the current site (Google Chrome). Click the extension icon and type any word to initiate Google’s site: search for the current domain.

4 Uses of Google’s URL Inspection Tool

Google’s Search Console offers tools to identify crawling and indexing problems.

One of the most helpful but often overlooked is the “URL inspection” tool. To use, paste your URL into the “Inspect any URL” field on the top of every Search Console page. You can also access the “URL inspection” tab in the left desktop menu or from the “Pages” section by clicking any URL in the report.

Search Console’s URL inspection tool is at the top of every page and via the left-side menu item.

URL Inspection Tool

Identify reasons for not indexing

The URL inspection tool shows obvious non-indexation issues (such as robots.txt blocking) and not-so-obvious.

One of the not-so-obvious in the Pages report is called “Duplicate without user-selected canonical,” wherein Google found two pages with the same content and chose to index one of them. The URL Inspection tool identifies the duplicate pages. Click one of the URLs in the report and then “Inspect URL.”

“Duplicate without user-selected canonical” is a not-so-obvious indexing glitch. Click image to enlarge.

You may need to fix via 301 redirects or new canonical tags, although it’s unnecessary if Google indexes the right page.

Another indexation glitch to investigate is “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user,” where Google indexed a page despite a conflicting canonical tag. This often occurs when the non-http page has the proper canonical tag, but Google indexed the https version. The fix could require a developer to point all URLs to https.

“Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” is another indexing glitch. Click image to enlarge.

Learn how Google discovered a page

Google discovers web pages via internal or external links and sitemaps. The URL inspection tool shows all links pointing to each indexed page. If a link points to a private page — one you didn’t intend to be crawled or indexed — identify how Google found it. Then correct (internal links) or redirect (external).

The URL inspection tool shows all links pointing to each indexed page. Click image to enlarge.

Confirm Google can render all page elements

Search Console can confirm whether Google can see, access, and crawl all elements on a web page.

Paste a URL into the inspection tool and click “View crawled text” to access the HTML rendered by Google.

Paste a URL into the inspection tool and click “View crawled text” to access the HTML. Click image to enlarge.

Then copy that code and paste into any text or HTML editor. Use Ctrl+F (CMD+F) to search for the element you want Google to render. For example, you can verify that Google JavaScript links and renders the anchor texts as intended.

Submit your URL for indexation

After updating a page, ask Google to re-index it by clicking “Request indexation.” That will prioritize indexing the updated page over others on your site. Avoid using this option too often or for too many pages. A properly structured site is easily crawled by Google without having to request it.

Ask Google to re-index a page by clicking “Request indexation.” Click image to enlarge.