Has anyone seen a ranking boost by adding a GTIN (barcode)

[Jon-S]

Hi All,

I wondered if anyone has seen any ranking improvements from adding a GTIN (barcode) number to their product pages?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

I personally haven't seen any ranking boost from barcodes, in fact I don't think I've ever seen barcodes being used on websites at all

However, even if Google can read and understand what barcodes stand for, it would get only the name of product, maybe SKU number, manufacturer etc. - none of the important stuff. You gonna have all that information on a page anyway, but what would make a difference is compelling description, which is not transferrable with barcodes.

So, no, I haven't seen boost, I don't think it would help no matter if Google can understand barcodes or not.

Hope this helps.

[Jon-S]

Thanks for the response Dmitrii, I haven't seen the GTIN used anywhere so it got me thinking. I try testing it and see what happens.

Cheers Jon

[Jon-S]

Thought I'd provide a bit of an update on this one for you all, I add the gtin number to two different products one gtin was added as a product attribute (text and number) and the other was added with schema markup (Gtin14 - https://schema.org/gtin14).

I've seen no ranking boost to either product on the keywords I'm tracking for them however, I have seen a small increase in traffic to the product which uses schema markup. From what I can tell from my analytics it would appear that some users actually search google using the gtin number!

It seems as if gtin14 isnt widely used at present and as such I'm ranking in top spot. So i'm thinking of adding the gtin to all our products as a bit of a quick win to rank top for a small percentage of searches.

i suppose it all depends on what products your selling and your user demographic as to wether your potential customers would ever search using the gtin? My personal view after some more reading (gs1 smart search, formally gtin on the web - http://www.gs1.org/gs1-smartsearch) is that gtin is going to become more prominent in the not too distant future, but hey I'm no expert. I'd love to know if anyone else has tested this out or if they try it and get the same results as I have?