In a recent John Mueller Webmaster Hangout, an individual posted an interesting question on the display of sitelink search box on Google’s search results page. In response to it, John Mueller stated that sitelink search box mark-up does not mean that sitelink search box will be displayed in SERPs. Furthermore, he said that sitelink search box may also take a month or more to get displayed on the search results page. Here is the detailed question and answer for your reference:
Question Asked:
Not about how to implement (sitelink search box markup) but basically like how do i make it show or not?
John Mueller’s Response:
One of the things that I’ve seen with the site link search box is, if you set up the markup for this on your site, then this is something that takes quite a long time to actually be in effect.
So it’s not like other types of content where we can maybe crawl that page once or twice and then we can show that rich result type in the search results.
A sitelinks search box is something that we really need to see for the long run. Sometimes it takes a month, maybe even longer, to be visible in the search results.
Also, the Markup for the site links search box doesn’t mean that we will show a site link search box for your site, but rather if we show a site link search box for your site than with that markup we can pick the one that you prefer like if you have an internal site search then we could show you that one instead. So those are the kind of tricky aspects there in that we dont always show this for most sites and when you do provide this markup we need to see it for a longer period of time before its visible in the search results
Key Learnings:
- Adding sitelink searchbox Markup does not guarantee sitelink searchbox will be displayed in search results.
- Sitelink searchbox might take a month or more to be displayed in search results.
- If you have an internal site search, Google may show it in its search results.
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3 thoughts on “John Mueller Says “Sitelink Search Box Markup Doesn’t Mean Sitelink Search Box Will Be Displayed in SERP””
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Hi Guys, It’s too much confusion. I have implement site search action as per google guidelines. But nothing happens on google search. Also I don’t want to use custom search engine(CSE) on our website. Let me know How other site display sitelinks searchbox on google.
Hi Deepak, the article talks about the same thing which you are facing. It is not necessary that implementing site search schema would find you a search box in SERPs. Google will evaluate your website and then decide to show it or not. It can take some time too. So be relax and wait for some more time. Do let us know if this article and our comment helped you to resolve your query.