Sitelink Search Box mark-up when multiple query strings are used

[seanginnaw]

Hi all,

I'm looking to implement sitelink search box mark-up in Google Tag Manager in JSON-LD format. This would be popped into the Custom HTML tag and would look a little something like:

The above option is great if you have one query string for your search term, but what if you had a URL that triggered two query strings - for example:

https://www.example.com/search?q=searchterm&category=all

Would you need to amend the code something like the below:

Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers,

Sean

[StephanSolomonidis]

Hi Sean,

While multiple variables are technically allowed—Schema.org only requires that your URI templates follow RFC6570, and that does allow multiple variables—there's no indication that Google will recognise it.

In fact, if you look at schema.org/SearchAction, you'll see there's no such property as "query-input". The property they've agreed on is the more flexible "query". Google isn't using that, and it seems that, for now, they'll only expand and use one variable in your target URL.

They might change it in the future. For now, as a bit of a rubbish workaround, you could hardcode the value of category to be "all", like this:

"target": "https://www.example.com/search?q={search_term_string}&category=all"

This way, sitelink search results will always at least come through to your site and by default search through all categories. But by then, at least users are on your site, and you could then use faceted navigation to help them drill down into particular categories.