If my products aren't showing in rich snippets, is there still value in adding product schema?

[Haleyb35]

I'm adding category pages for an online auction site and trying to determine if its worth marking up the products listed on the page. All of the individual product pages have product schema, but I have never seen them show up in rich snippets likely due to the absence of the price element and the unique nature of the items. Is there still value in adding the product schema even if the items won't show in rich snippets?

Also, is it possible the product schema will help optimize for commerce related keywords such as [artist name] + for sale?

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Yes.  Google have said many many times (too many to cite) that schema, J-son and using the data highlighter is one of the best ways that you can spend your time optimising.  You're making their lives easier and telling them directly how they can enrich the user experience for their searchers.

I have tested a number of different ways.  I have rich snippet plugins for review stars.  These are great and if I add the google review widget to a page then the star rating of that product will show almost immediately (we have 230ish google reviews at 4.9.)

Then I discovered the data highlighter and found that this works really well for individual products and getting reviews (the words not the stars) in the results and also helps with all sorts of other things.  So each new page gets the full treatment from the data highlighter including local business, reviews, authors (if it's an article) and products.  You need to include the prices and availability and if these are not available on the page to highlight then use the 'add extra info' function in the data highlighter and just say that the products are immediately available and you can add a price.  This can be a 'from price' or a range. But without the price you're unlikely to get anywhere in my experience.  Experiment with adding prices.  If it's an auction add the price as "zero" or "$0" and just see whether you get featured.

Its a very responsive and fast system so you don't have to wait, just add the markup, send in the spiders and wait a few hours.  Lately google has been taking longer to index so it might take a day or so but it's still a short enough timeframe to run tests.  Also if you're using shopify or wordpress then you should be appearing with site-links, hyperlinks in the SERP and reviews specific to your product anyway if you're using H1's and H2's correctly and structuring the pages properly.

Then lastly there's just adding in the code to the page in the header / footer.  I've found that this trumps everything.  For example If I say i've got 230 reviews in the footer, then my little widget (that updates my reviews each day will not update and i'll still be stuck on 230 even when the widget is saying more.  When I go in and update the code in the header it will update in a day or so.  So it seems that manually adding the code is the firmest and strongest (or most trustworthy) signal.

Also remember that google has to trust your site to serve up rich results so newer sites, dodgy claims or anything other then whiter than white-hat is going to end you up with nothing showing up.  Google are always trying to verify markup and if they catch you out exaggerating or being inaccurate then it's going to cause problems.  They've said this many times too.  It's classed as 'markup spam'.

So get highlighting or get yourself a code-builder to make some J-son or code you can insert directly onto the product pages.  I'm not a developer but I do it with a tool called SEO Profiler where you just type the words and it turns it into J-son for the site by magic and you just paste it in there.  There's free versions of this on the schema.org site.  Also check this out from moz on schema

You will start showing just give it time. And mark up EVERYTHING you can.  Always worth it, but be comprehensive or it won't show. So add in the best guess price and the best guess 'anything' that's missing.