Just every now and again, search engines love to throw our merry band of SEO types the occasional curveball and keep us on our toes with new toys and updates. Yesterday was one such day for the world of structured data in web page design.
What’s structured data?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two years, you’ll be all over “rich snippets” – those fabulous little search results that help you stand out from the crowd in your organic rankings. Structured data added to web pages helps search engines parse your data into different types of search results, like recipe search. Review ratings, events, recipes, company names, contact name, job titles and even friend connections on Facebook have at some stage been visible in the search results for “white listed” web sites.
Making the right choice on the use of markup
In Google’s words, “adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way.” – this is so true. For webmasters making the difficult decision on which markup to choose has been quite a hurdle. The simplicity of Microformats over the depth and creativity of RDFa, or the HTML5 working group approved Microdata? What about the RDF/XML based Goodrelations for ecommerce?
It seems the search engines have made that choice for us by introducing a new, standardised collaboration called schema.org.
More choices for more entities
Solving the problem of inconsistent options for structured data markup, schema.org gets on with the task of opening up a bunch of new entities for webmasters to describe in their web pages. Schemas for movies, music, restaurants, local business, TV series and “intangibles” such as offers are all in the new vocabulary. If you’ve got a website with any of the types of data described by the new schemas, you should get excited! Check out their full list – it’s incredibly extensive.
How does schema.org work?
Schema.org is based on Microdata. In simple terms, each type of data or entity can be described by a vocabulary. Vocabularies for an entity are described on the appropriate page at schema.org, so, for example, if you’ve got a music listing on your webpage, you’ll just need to reference the Music Recording vocabulary at Schema.org.
To implement schema.org’s vocabularies, you only need to understand the attributes: itemscope, itemtype, itemprop and you’ll need to have the URL of the vocabulary to hand.
The instructions for basic implementation can be found on the getting started page at schema.org – let’s look at the basic elements:
Which would produce:
CEO
SEOgadget.co.uk
In this very simple example, I’m using the “itemscope” attribute to declare that the following html contains data about something. That something, “itemtype”, is a person (me!). Each property, my name, picture, job title can be found in the vocabulary at schema.org. Declaring the appropriate scheme might allow a search engine to parse the data and use it for a rich snippet or maybe a people search engine?
But I implemented microformats / RDFa – now what?
You’re not the only one – we’re all in the same boat. The simple answer is, search engines are great at getting us to accept their standards. At some point we’ll all be using schema.org to structure our data. If you’re already on the Google rich snippets white list, don’t panic. Google will continue to support existing structured data formats for the foreseeable future. If you’ve got the development resource, or you’re in the process of a site redesign, then migrating to the appropriate schema.org vocabulary shouldn’t be too much of a challenge for a capable web developer.
More options and more types of search
For me, this is an exciting play from the search engines. They’re working to simplify the problem for webmasters of knowing which markup to choose and at the same time, offering more options for types of data to be structured. The really big deal, for me, is Bing’s entrance into the rich snippets arena. Their support for rich snippets until now has been lacklustre at best. Hopefully, with a standardised approach, we’ll be able to get the same rich snippets from all 3 engines.
Google recipe search was the first “mainstream” structured data search engine. I can’t help but think that with greater proliferation of a standard approach to structured data, we’ll see more services like recipe search from the engines soon.
Personally I believe the most stardards the better. We saw it before with Sitemap.xml (even though Google has then took its own way with the video one).
And I think it is going to be a real need for any website to start using every tools available in order to stands out in the SERPs, being those overcrowded with any kind of verticals (just today Google announced BIGGER images in the universal search).
Ah!... and I was sooo sure you, Richard, were going to write a post about Schema.org... I don't know why ;)
I think one of the more important markup tags I've seen from Schema.org is significantLinks.
They have defined this as "The most significant URLs on the page. Typically, these are the non-navigation links that are clicked on the most".
This makes me question how metrics such as PageRank will be affected. Should a group of links marked as significant receieve a higher weight of PageRank? It's quite possible that significant links will pass anchor text as well if a previous link to the page was set in navigation, effictively making obselete the first-link-counts rule, and I am interested in putting that to test.
A lot of room to explore with this.
Well done, Mike. A good post that 'sells' the proposition well. This is going to become a standard 'toolkit', I suspect. However, it also has the usual advantage of ubiquitous, effective standards that those who take the time to understand them and apply then consistently for clients will reap the rewards.
Mike??
Mike?!
Mike!
C-c-c-c-c-comb bbbbreaker!
Mike Baxter is a genius. He's obviously much better than that Richard Baxter guy...
I didn't want to say anything, but Richard has been passing off Mike's work as his own for a long time now. It has to stop! ;)
Mike test...
Testing one two... one two...
Chuck Norris is Mike Baxter's friend; fact.
Where is Chuck Norris?
Hahahaha!
Andrew thank you for your thoughtful response. We'd love to see you comment more often, please don't let us scare you away by the "Mike" comments. :) Look forward to more comments!
I think we need to invent Mike Baxter and make him alive in the SEOmoz blog :). Seriously Andrew, we are just crazy and those comments were not against you at all.
Richard,
Thanks so much for breaking this down. Sounds like an interesting leap forward in search. :)
First things first, Richard thanks a lot for the post. I will definitely tell my tech people to investigate and implement this. Though, I would like to know: what are my chances to get this ‘schema.org’ thing accepted and shown by search engines?
As far as I know, you have to wait for a rather long period of time before search engine decides if you are worth having microfarads shown for your website or not. I would highly appreciate some tips on the topic or any information no what makes search engines to come to a certain decision. I know it might be a topic for a quite different post; this is why I don’t expect ‘tips here, in comments. :) At least promise us to write about it in more details someday.
Thanks in advance.
I think to answer your question - its not a matter of when but of if. If you are working your long-tail well, you should start seeing microdata for ads show up in items searched for in your long-tail keyword searches. And honestly to this point in time Google has been slow to put microdata (in any form) into the search results. I think that we will see it much more now that this standard has passed. Also, with this standard, it looks like, you will have a better understanding of how to show relevant data to the search engines much more clearly. Hopefully this gives them what they need to rank you, or anyone, more effectively.
I share the same concern. I think it will indeed be some time before the 'average' website benefits from the schema marckup. That said, we're implementing as much 'Web 3.0' as we can (such as open social graph). And this schema.org is a very fun concept because I think it shows us what the web will be like in the near future.
Anyone have any ideas on how to easily add the schema.org microdata into wordpress pages / posts?
Will be interesting to see how this is adopted by the common CMS systems. Obviously, we can do this ourself in code for snippets etc but this seems like a perfect extension to the wordpress custom post types and for Joomla / Drupal CCK extensions.
Additions and updates to CMS and ecommerce sites should make this transparent for most people over time (hopefully).
Hey Daniel - you could hard code this into content on the page for now or if you wanted to get a little more adventorous hack your theme. I am going to try to put a bit of time aside to have a play and implement something into a wordpress theme (my 60 hour week is laughing at that last 'putting some time aside' statement)
As an example, the wordpress author box in most themes could easily be hacked to include the Person itemtype so it's not a massive leap. Time to keep an eye on the big theme providers like yootheme and woothemes to see what they come up with as well.
Marcus
One of the more interesting aspects of this endeavor will be how the search engines listen to the community and adopt new standards and modify the existing ones.
For instance, they haven't included any schemas that would work for job listings despite that being a multi-billion dollar industry for search engines. To demonstrate the possibility of the format, I put together a proposed schema at https://blog.linkup.com/2011/06/02/linkup-recommends-new-job-listing-format-for-schema-org/.
Regardless of if this version of the spec is used, or if a Opportunity schema is even considered, the aspect that deserves our attention is if the communication with the brains behind Schema.org is 2-way or just us screaming down an empty hallway.
Agree SE's should consider adopting this.
Wow, I was just working on some formatting styles for reviews in Google, Bing and Yahoo and now this came out... crazy! Anyways, great post!
Yes, amazing, thank you for the post, also just working on the images, looks the business.
Hi Richard,
Firstly thanks for a fantastic quick guide on the new schema developments, have to admit just from the outset, this could be a start of something great, seeing the "superpowers" of the SE world coming together.
I'll be sure to look into this alot further and hopefully have a few good examples of its use added into the start builds of a couple of projects I've been planning. Will be interesting to see the effect of adding this to a new project as well as currently established ones.
Thanks again for the great article.
Excellent post, I can see some great possibilities from this (and some for evil too), good to see the SE's working together :)
Hi Richard,
Thank you for the wonderful post and headsup on this. What a wonderful community to have this much input and opinions. I so love SEOMoz.
Mike test. hehe.
Hello everybody
We success in displaying the ratings from our website (www.restaurants-sud-ouest.com) into google maps results.
If you are looking that : https://blog.ohmyweb.fr/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/restaurants-sud-ouest-avis.jpg, or that : https://maps.google.fr/maps/place?um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=L'estacade+bordeaux&fb=1&gl=fr&hq=L'estacade&hnear=0xd5527e8f751ca81:0x796386037b397a89,Bordeaux&cid=3878645611833273950
ratings posted on our website are displayed on google map of the restaurant.
Thanks to microdatas, we did that !!
Best regards,
Mathieu
nice post:)
With today's "Non-Whiteboard Thursday" this is exactly what I needed to get my head wrapped around this information. Now I'm off to see how I can implement it in mine and my clients sites.
Thanks for an easy to follow along introduction!
Nice article, thanks
Hi Richard!Very interesting post. Was wondering, if structured data would be a good idea for an ecommerce website to apply on the product pages, that has a great deal of duplicate content with similar websites. Long and manual process to fix this problem. Would that help you think finally or not so much?Thanks for sharing your valuable insights.
Thanks ! This article is kind of old, but we are still using it for all our customer ! https://www.netick.fr/ ! Also thanks for your amazing tools !
Hi Richard:
A nice post, but I think it is utterly needed to clarify the relationship between
1. Google and Yahoo have confirmed explicitly that GoodRelations in RDFa syntax remains a fully supported markup for product / e-commerce data. Bing has also just announced they will support GoodRelations in the future.
2. Since mixing RDFa and Microdata is not recommended by Google and Yahoo, GoodRelations in RDFa is the only proper way of combining Facebook Open Graph markup with markup for rich snippets, since Facebook is not part of the party.
3. The Rich Snippets Validator (example: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heppnetz.de%2Frdfa4google%2Ftc1.html&view=) can currently show a preview only for GoodRelations in RDFa, not for schema.org in Microdata.
That means that you can currently debug your markup only for GoodRelations in RDFa; for Microdata, you have no effective testing environment.
4. Google extracts way more GoodRelations properties than listed in the short documentation on the Google site. Check here for extended testcases:
They all validate with Google and Yahoo.
Now, the interesting thing is that you can bet that Google uses this additional information as a signal for future relevance assessment.
For instance, if you explicitly state that your offer is valid in California using gr:eligibleRegions, e.g.
<div about="#offer" typeof="gr:Offering">
<div property="gr:eligibleRegions" content="US-CA" datatype="xsd:string">We deliver to California!</div>
...
</div>
then you can bet that a request from an IP in California is more likely to see this than an offer that lacks target region information.
5. Even if you want to use the main schema.org elements in Microdata syntax, you can combine them with GoodRelations properties and classes for things that schema.org does not support or supports only poorly, like
etc. We will add respective Microdata examples to the GoodRelations documentation at
shortly.
Best wishes
Martin Hepp
Disclaimer: I am the lead developer of GoodRelations, a standard e-commerce vocabulary for RDFa and Microdata. For more info, see https://purl.org/goodrelations/
I'm all for structured data possibly being a ranking signal in the future, looks like that future isn't as far as many thought.
I'm not a fan of how the big corps came together leaving the work of the semweb community behind (or picking what they want from it and forcing the public to play their way), but syntax and politics aside, I'm stoked.
HTML5 & Microdata Language is now friendly and beloved to the activities of Google where you can understand it very simple
Game changer? How will this effect normal web endeavors with out the tech no how?
The real encouragement for me here is that search engines are going to accept the same standards for this - for once team work that will help, instead of fighting it out between us and each individual search engine.
I'm glad that this has finally occurred and will be looking to ensure future clients work (and any currently clients where applicable) meet these standards - then being able to sit back and enjoy a coffee knowing that, for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long, one size genuinely does fit all!
Great post Richard! We just finished working on a Schema SEO service this afternoon. Check her out at https://www.schemamarkup.com Let us know what you think. Thanks!
It is always a nice thing when the engines come together to agree on things such as schemas and sitemap.xml etc... The impact on SERPs is going to be very interesting to watch.
Awesome post Richard! I'm excited to see what direction this points the SERP ship.
Great post. I was just reading about this yesterday. I would like to know if the standard is now official. I have been using the hcard format for years and don't want to switch over unless I know that it is going to get used and indexed. Also with a new standard is Google and Bing still going to recognize my old hcard formated site information or should I go back and update to the new standard?
How topical! I've just finished a brief for our dev team detailing all of our product-level microdata requirements.
This is the biggest step that semantic web has made in years. I'm looking forward to increased adoption (i.e. outside of local, and recipes...) by the engines in the next 12 months or so. Data enrichment for data enrichment's sake isn't much fun if they don't actually use it (either visibly on the SERPs or algorithmically).
Absolutely love that the SEs collaborated on this scheme. I've already had a play, and it's by far the easiest form of microformatting I've ever dealt with. Great post and very timely - I fully encourage all SEOs to get on the bandwagon and adopt this asap.
Sir amazing post! And Thanks for that, to be honest I went to the post for the 1st time and I am write now on the getting started page and amazed and shocked (positively) to see the explanation provided with very clear examples…
Thank you for pointing your finger on Schema.org it will be very helpful for sure…
Thanks for the posts Richard. I am looking forward to seeing what the SERPs look like by mid-summer...see how this whole think really shapes up.
Great approach from Google,Yahoo and Bing.....lets see how schema.org get us a new dimension for search!
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/google-bing-yahoo-partner-for-better-search-results/articleshow/8710572.cms
.
Good information the best thing is that all search engines are working together and not working aggainst each other.
Interesting times ahead.
There is always the other side of the coin, where spammers would like to play their part by abusing the system quite like how it ended up with using meta tags.
A nice roundup Richard. Any collaboration between the engines can only be a good thing. Looking at the complete hierarchy there's definately something every client can implement, whereas before I must admit to finding the previous options a bit restrictive.
Hey Mike
Agreed - Microformats are too restrictive, and RDFa was so unrestricted you could pretty much come up with anything - both had their strengths and weaknesses. I like having a framework to get my teeth into!
This is gonna be awesome!! and a lot of code rewriting. But mostly awesome!!
Am I the only one who is a little bit lost? This whole idea of microformats is new to me. I keep reading the info and I'm confused. LOL!
I think I'll get a good night's sleep and then revisit this post again. It sounds like something I should be paying attention to. :)
Great post. I was trying to avoid microformats but with Google Recipe and such it looks like I can't avoid them anymore!
Finally! A standardized set of instructions, with great examples and uses. Now onto templating...
Thanks for the great post!
A standard schema set like this has been a while coming, still looks like some of the docs could do with a little work, on the Product schema you have to look through the example to see how half of it should be implemented and there is no mention of some things that are currently covered with the existing microformats like currency.
Richard, thanks for the great summary on this. I just posted on the same topic, and referenced the fact we'll be watching SEOmoz for the research to validate the significance of this change: https://dlvr.it/TzSkC
It would be nice if products marked up with schema would go into product search without uploading a spreadsheet or sending a data feed to Google.
We put together a post on Schema.org as well https://globerunnerseo.com/schema-org-seo