First of all, thank you to everyone who listened in to the Microformats and Schema.org webinar with Richard Baxter and myself. If you are a PRO member and haven't had a chance to listen in, be sure to check it out!
During and after the webinar we received a ton of great feedback and questions which we unfortunately just didn't have time to cover off (ah man!). But…as they were awesome questions, SEOmoz have given us the chance to rock out a blog post as a follow up. So, sit back and enjoy as we take your head from confusion to conclusion.
1. Can you show/speak about pros and cons of using Schema versus using micro formats?
I don't think we can really compare micro formats to schema.org directly - micro formats are a form of structured data, like microdata and RDFa with a limited set of pre-defined properties. The sole purpose of Schema.org is to extend the vocabulary used in structured data, and at the moment only microdata can be combined with Schema.org. Although there has been talk of plans to start using RDFa.
Due to the extensive vocabulary on offer and universal support from the major search engines, the future is looking bright for the growth of Schema.org. Can the same really be said for micro-formats? IMO no, it's an easy to understand mark up but doesn't have the universal support to maintain growth.
2. What are other advantages of using schema and microdata except for getting better rich snippets?
Marking up items on a web page creates a stronger overall definition of what the content is really about. Aaron Bradley wrote a great blog post on seoskeptic.com deciphering Google's semantic search intentions.
You only need to look at Google's recipe search as an example of what is starting to evolve from the data contained within the mark up we install.
3. Did you guys notice any improvement in rankings after implementing schema?
I personally haven't seen a direct impact on rankings from integrating any form of structured data, but that doesn't mean it won't happen in the near future. With the purchase of Metaweb/Freebase back in 2010, and new developments for its Semantic search on the horizon, we can only guess this will be playing a greater role.
4. What are some practical applications of micro data or micro formats with a higher education institute? Is it possible to define a new "item type" such as courses, degrees, etc?
Ok, let's break down a few ideas which have the potential to generate a rich snippet for an Educational institute, first up ‘Place'.
There is a schema type for Educational Organization that allows us to mark up the name and location of the institute, resulting in the address featuring in the rich snippet. The mark up would resemble something like:
<span itemprop="name"></span>
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span itemprop="streetAddress"></span>
<span itemprop="addressLocality"></span>
<span itemprop="addressRegion"></span> <span itemprop="postalCode"></span> </div>
With regards to the courses themselves, why not gather some reviews from recent graduates for each course. This can then be marked up with standard Review schema, but then combined with some additional mark up to describe the actual person who left the review as a recent graduate. This can be done using the itemprop="alumni":
<span itemprop="name"></span>
So now that we have a few reviews and ratings from recent graduates, why not take this one step further and create an aggregate rating with schema.org, which will ultimately lead to the star rating rich snippet.
If the resource is available another awesome addition to a course page would be a very quick introductory video of each course. This in turn can be marked up using schema's VideoObject, which when combined with video XML sitemaps, correct video formatting and a bunch of other items described in this cool post by Geoff of Distilled, will lead to a video thumbnail being generated in the search results. Here is a quick piece of Schema video mark up:
Here are a few other things which could result in a rich snippet for an educational institute:
- Selling books/resources for use with each course online? – This content could be marked up using a combination of Book and Product schema.
- Are you running open days/workshops for related courses? – Perfect opportunity to use the EducationEvent schema.
As for defining new ‘item types' it is totally possible, check out the extension mechanism. This will allow applications to develop a basic level of understanding of the mark up used, but it's unlikely to lead to a rich snippet being generated unless there is a large/growing popularity for the particular item type.
However the Schema vocabulary is growing, so although there may not be a defining type right now there could well be in the near future. For example there has been recent talk of collaboration between ESPN and Google to define a new Sports schema.
5. With the review section... wouldn't this allow websites to manipulate their ratings? How will this be monitored by Google?
Yes, and it's been happening, A LOT! Originally there was an approval process for a domain to become white-listed for rich snippets, which involved informing Google via a simple form submission. But I remember it having a pretty heavy waiting list, anything from 4 weeks to 6 months.
This eventually changed, and the approval speed for websites significantly improved (relying primarily on algorithmic validation). Within a day or so of implementing a set of mark up, rich snippets were being generated. This of course then led to a lot of the abuse, and a crackdown on spam by Google allowing people to report rich snippet spam.
There are always going to be questions on the validity of review data, but it's a really tricky one to judge. I wonder whether trusted third party review platforms could play a greater role in helping to filter out spam in a similar way to that seen in Google Shopping, but even then they are still open to abuse.
6. In the IMdb example the image has an item property on it but it is not in the search result. Why is this?
Very good question, this would make for such an awesome rich snippet. Outside of video thumbnails, software applications, recipe search, and news/articles, rich snippet support for the image property is still quite restricted.
7. Do you have an example of breadcrumbs showing up in results?
Motorauthority.com uses microdata to mark up its breadcrumb trail, resulting in the following snippet:
8. Do you know of any way to mark up a "product category" page? Not a product aggregator page (a list of the same products available from different vendors), but, say, an e-commerce category page that lists different products?
Ok, let's say we are a kick ass clothing store and stock merchandise from a number of cool brands like Animal, Quicksilver, Rip Curl etc. Let's take a broad category like ‘Animal' as our example, which includes products like bags, shirts, shorts and hoodies – there are a couple of things we could affectively do:
- Aggregate review data across all Animal products to create an overall rating (– or ‘popularity' score if you like) for the brand category.
- Aggregate the price of all products in the category using schema.org/AggregateOffer - marking up the total number of products available in the category, and the min and max price of associated products to add the price range to the rich snippet.
The code for this would resemble something like:
Using the above code, here is an example rich snippet:
9. Does associating CSS with these microformat classes have any negative effect?
Applying CSS formatting directly to any of the properties of the mark up language shouldn't affect the rich snippet code in any way. As long as the correct naming conventions have been used, there shouldn't be any trouble.
10. Is there a Rich Snippet Generator and Schema Generator you would recommend?
There aren't a huge amount of actual code generators, but here are the ones I'm aware of:
- Schema-creator.org
- Microformats.org creator – hcard, hreview, hcalendar
- microDatagenerator
Here's a list of some other tools and plug-ins which may also be of use.
11. Does it matter where you put any of these markup codes on the site?
The actual location of the mark up on a web page doesn't impact the ability to generate rich snippets. The ordering of mark up can however, especially when nesting elements, so be sure to test thoroughly using the Google testing tool, or the Bing WMT equivalent.
Thanks again to all those who submitted questions. We hope that this post provides the answers you were seeking, and if there are any new questions please fire away in the comments!
Thanks for this thoughtful and practical post, Daniel, and for the pointer to my article.
A couple of comments...
1 - Pros and Cons of Using Schema.org vs. MicroformatsYou're quite right when you say that they're different animals. There's a far greater number of schema.org microdata types available then there are microformats (it's the breadth of types, not the property limitations for any given type, that's important here).
The schema.org vocabulary also has an extension mechanism specified that, at least conceptually, allows publishers to build new types and properties - although these extensions will only directly help in search visibility if they are adopted by the search engines.
For vocabulary support and extensibility the real rival to microdata is RDFa (for anyone confused about the nomenclature, microdata is a specification - the markup language - and schema.org, along with data-vocabulary.org are microdata-supported vocabularies).
Yes, there are plans to introduce an "RDFa lite" for publisher ease of use, but RDFa itself has long been understood by, and its use officially sanctioned by, the search engines. For SEO/marketing types the most important implementation of RDFa, and a very real rival for schema.org microdata for ecommerce sites, is GoodRelations.
I urge those interested in comparing and contrasting the different structured markup languages check out this excellent post by Manu Sporny:An Uber-comparison of RDFa, Microdata and Microformats
https://manu.sporny.org/2011/uber-comparison-rdfa-md-uf/
4 - Education-Related Types
Your observation highlights for me what I've noted on more than one occasion recently: the obvious lack of schema.org types for classes and courses that don't fall into the EducationEvent category. I'm hopeful somebody or some organization moves creates such an extension soon.
While we still lack a type for things like classroom courses, the LMRI (Learning Resource Metadata Initiative) has recently released a draft proposal for "a common metadata vocabulary for educational resources" (like textbooks) that some in the education field may find useful:
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/Properties
5 - Review Manipulation
A note here that potential gaming of schema.org is not, of course, restricted to review data, but any data encoded in microdata. More "semspam" will inevitably appear as Google (et al.) start to give more visibility to other types (whether in the form of rich snippets, improved rankings or other mechanisms).
Interestingly one of the things that Google can (well, must) "bring to the table" for the semantic web is spam detection and filtering mechanisms. Right now, it appears that they're approaching the issue from a "whitelist" perspective. A search quality highlights from January [1] explictly referenced what is basically "qualified site detection":
We improved our process for detecting sites that qualify for shopping, recipe and review rich snippets. As a result, you should start seeing more sites with rich snippets in search results.
[1] https://insidesearch.blogspot.ca/2012/01/30-search-quality-highlights-with.html
7 - BreadcrumbsMotorauthority.com uses data-vocabulary.org microdata to markup breadcrumbs. This is probably why they're showing up, as the schema.org explanation and example for this is almost certainly wrong. Google pulled its video on the subject, and there's an open issue about the placement of itemprop for breadcrumbs in schema.org:
https://www.w3.org/2011/webschema/track/issues/10
Stay tuned. In the interim I suggest publishers use either data-vocabulary.org microdata or RDFa for breadcrumbs - rather than schema.org - as detailed by Google:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=185417
11 - Location of Code and Code Validation
I also recommend this structured data linter from Stéphane Corlosquet and Gregg Kellogg:
https://linter.structured-data.org/
Thanks for the detailed reply, and especially for the data linter link.
Great Info Daniel, A few questions from my end as well -
- Sajeet
Hey Sajeet, thanks for the feedback.
1 – as long as the mark up validates on each of those pages correctly there shouldn’t be any weird results, although you may face some conflicts depending which elements you are trying to mark up, especially if these have been nested properties.
2 – Absolutely, not necessarily just to ensure that the rich snippet remains but to further define the content on the page to search engines.
3 – I think this will happen to some extent but only to grow the number of standardised properties available, purely based on popularity. I don’t believe it will be possible to review these on a site by site basis to generate rich snippets for custom properties.
4 – As mentioned in the post, with the acquisition of Freebase back in 2010 and the new semantic search enhancements, we can only guess this will be having a greater role. I think there needs to be a stronger control over the validity of the data being marked up before it can truly have an impact on rankings, as we have seen with the rich snippet spam a lot of the properties are open to miss-use.
Even if you are not gaining rankings you are receiving better CRT. So you have to start using them.
Great input!! The snipet gives a more useful overview fo the page and enhances the user experience.
@algogmbh_petra did you mean, CTR - Clickthru Rate? What does CRT mean?
Sorry petrosianii - yes, I meant of course CTR --> Click Trough Rate
Have you seen any feedback or studies on breadcrumb markup affecting CTR? Half of the time I find it annoying because I want to see the exact URL, but I think that's my SEO tendencies, and not what a normal searcher would experience.
-
On #8, the Schema.org documentation for AggregateOffer states that it applies to a single products, not multiple like you use in your example.
"When a single product that has different offers (for example, the same pair of shoes is offered by different merchants), then AggregateOffer can be used."
Obviously the snippet looks fine in SERPs, but it's serving incorrent Schema data which might be detrimental down the road...
Hey Kane,
That’s a great point, and you’re right to raise it. However I do believe the description is fully open to interpretation. The description from Schema.org on aggregateoffer uses ‘a product’ as an example or even as a suggestion for its use, there are no clear guidelines which state that this cannot be used for multiple products.
Right now there is no reason a rich snippet could not be generated using the example. I think this really opens up a broader conversation on how search engines can really classify rich snippet miss-use/spam, as a lot of the data used to create rich snippets in general raise questions of validity e.g. how can we trust the validity of reviews on all websites? There is definitely a growing need for clearer guidelines and control for the mark up being integrated.
RE breadcrumb trails – I’m not aware of any specific studies focusing on the CTR, if anyone knows of any I would love to read them! Very interesting scenarios as a full URL can display a greater relevance for a search query, although would be naturally limiting potential options for users to click through to a page on a website.
Great question, thanks Kane.
Thanks for the response - hard to know if they'll move towards more lax or more strict interpretations down the road, but I like to future proof as much as possible when hardcoding something like this into a site. The trouble is it produces a nice-looking snippet in your example, so I personally would also lean towards implementing it despite the inconsistency with the official statement.
Thanks Daniel for the guidelines and insight you are providing!
I can not understand why the powers that be have not defined "Services" within the schema and that they have to be denigrated by trying to incorporate them using the product hierarchy? (As higlighted above by Francisco_Meza and Matt Schmidt)
I'm confident in saying that there is a definite difference between "a product" and "services available", in a commercial environment. The former has different specifics and has a fixed price associated, whereas the latter in the majority of cases, requires dialogue before a price can be agreed as the extent of the service varies from client to client.
I just wish there was a process whereby one could make strong recommendations to the governing body who seem unapproachable (please prove me wrong on that assumption!).
Nonetheless thanks for you positive input, Daniel!
QUESTION for Daniel.
This makes perfect sense for someone who has an ecommerce site. How do I mark up a service if there is no schema for services. There are for product, but not services like insurance, shipping, credit repair (intangibles).
Hey Francisco, good question! Although there is a limited support for specific areas that doesn’t mean you cannot generate rich snippets for any website. For example local business schema would be a great one, or if you have some resource available to create some guides/educational resources you can combine this with rel=author. You could even gain feedback/reviews for those guides to enhance these rich snippets. These will not directly impact core pages on the site, but can enhance CTR for longer tail searches for this new type of content.
Francisco,
I had the same issue but have begun using the product schema for my services. A service is essentially a product after all. Ultimately it would be great to have a well thought out services schema but I think this is a good work around until then.
Schema.org is a must. it is part of the onpage optimization.
Thanks for clearing some of these questions up, especially the one about whether CSS affects the microformat classes or not. Good to know I can implement rich snippets without altering the look and feel of my sites.
Should brand organisation schema be placed in the header in order for it to work ?
It doesn't matter where you place it in the page. As long as the structure is correct.
Thank you for the great information, Daniel. So helpful to have more information to help me understand the basics. I'm going to check out the webinar, too. Cheers!
The above post of question/answer session regarding schema provide a lot of knowledge regarding SEO multiple aspects like breadcrumbs, rich snippets and many more and all these information make my view clearer in this regard because I was also a little bit confusing about the rich snippet topic.
Great post! Couple questions:
Thanks!!!
This is great information for me. I am implementing rich snippets for all my web pages.
"Due to the extensive vocabulary on offer and universal support from the major search engines, the future is looking bright for the growth of Schema.org. Can the same really be said for micro-formats? IMO no, it's an easy to understand mark up but doesn't have the universal support to maintain growth."
microformats have been universally supported by the big three forever. pretty sure since before microdata was a specification.
they're also the most used semantic flavoring on the web.
great article, just wanted to point that out. clearly i am in the mf camp :)
Pretty old topic, but thought I would add. You have to be careful with AggregateRating markup. They state in the guidelines, if the page doesn't have actual reviews on it, you can't use it.
Working my way through how to best pull 3rd party review data into the site, and display their ratings of a local business, while staying in "compliance".
I have a question along these lines
We've tried two different semantic markups to get reviews published on our website showing up in google. They were two different versions of hReview. Neither seemed to work, or made any difference in the search results for our business name.
So my question is: how long does it take to get the structured data to show up in Google search results?
It’s usually within a couple of days, but could be anything up to 4 weeks. Just bear in mind you will need to combine this with Hreview aggregate in order to generate the rich snippet. I would recommend testing thoroughly with the Google rich snippets testing tool, if no rich snippet is generated here then there may be something missing within the mark up.
Thanks for the info, Daniel!
Our Google Local reviews had gotten wiped out in January after we changed our business name. We didn't think they'd ever come back, and were still missing up until today.
After reading this post a few days ago, we marked up the testimonials on our website with Schema.org review markup. We only marked up 1 of the reviews there, just for testing purposes.
Interestingly, the marked up review is still not showing a rich snippet in Google search. However, several of the other reviews that were deleted from Google Local have "mysteriously" showed up out of the blue! lol.
It feels like one of those SEO moments where it is just too good to be a pure coincidence. I wonder whether adding the schema.org markup to the page caused the Google Local spiders to start doing their jobs again??
Very strange - but the bottom line is: I'm happy because getting those older reviews back into Google SERPS was the whole point of doing this in the first place, lol!
Daniel, thank you for this post. I found it via its Google rich snippet, but I notice that it's using Open Graph markup. Looking at the guidelines at https://goo.gl/RAJy8, is that an unexpected result? Thanks, John
Thanks for this Daniel. Thought the mozinar was excellent so it's great to see this follow-up.
Is the advice to simply mark up absolutely everything you can using schema? Would you apply this to a homepage? You could conceivably have a homepage that features products, images, videos, reviews, aggregate rating, address, phone number, etc...
Would your advice be to mark the phone lot up using schema and let Google decide which rich snippets to produce? Or would you focus on the things you really want to pull through to a rich snippet, such as aggregate rating?
Or have I got the whole thing upside down by talking about rich snippets? Is the point more about semantic search and giving Google/Bing a better idea about what content features on our pages (in which case, presumably marking everything up makes most sense)?
Thanks Patrick – absolutely, within reason. Think about what each page tells you and whether there is a relevant connection for a rich snippet to be generated. For example, developing an aggregate rating for product pages creates a natural snippet as it is about the specific product, whereas applying that mark up to say the home page does not describe the full focus of the page, and could be considered rich snippet spam. Address and phone number could be marked up on the home page for a more natural snippet - we’re actually marking up this content on the home page of SEOGadget using microformats.
Even if rich snippets aren’t yet being generated for particular properties of structured data, if the content is already on the page, mark it up! I think there is certainly a deeper level of semantic relevance from doing so, but also could well generate a rich snippet in the future as support grows.
I have been mucking around improving my site, www.telugumuchatlu.com , and have been followng google webmaster for schema.org , Google Bing and Yahoo follow these indexing guidelines..this post was very useful and insightful.
This sort of articles make me wish I was a PRO Member.
Anyway, it's good to catch a glimpse on what subjects have been discussed. Unfortunately, all this vocabularies and such still have a long way to go. I've studied Semantic Web years ago and it's a bit sad to see that, while this idea expanded to SEO, the easy of use and opportunities are low.
Hey! Here's a solution I always give to people. Find a buddy to split the cost. You can even PM people who don't have a subscription.
If you're running Wordpress, this plugin is great for Breadcrumbs.
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rdfa-breadcrumb/
Google usually picks it up and applies the snippet right after the next cache of your page.
The other wordpress plugins (including Yoast's Wordpress SEO which I use as well) don't produce the same results for breadcrumbs. I suppose the difference is in the markup and method they're using.
Great read. I find the rich snippets to be very intriguing continuing forward. I'm left to wonder if further algorithms will be put in place to limit the snippet to the most relevant state making schematic.org mark ups not only very essential for the increase in CTR but also very critical on being correct. Or will the mark ups be left for submission similar to how the micro data was in the beginning? Either way I think that this is only going to get to be more a ranking factor as schematic.org grows and gains a great relevance.
Food for thought.
Thanks for the Info Daniel!
I never had the chance to look at those PRO videos of our other SEOmoz account. Thanks for this I think I will need to have a second look how this schema works.
For those on a Wordpress blog: I use the plugin SEO Ultimate in order to produce hotel review tags on my travel blog. Its rich snippet creator supports Microformats, HTML5 Microdata and RDFa.
The rating stars show up nicely in a Google SERP, say for this excellent 5 star hotel in the Swiss Alps (Google search): Giardino Mountain - new design hotel in the Swiss Alps in Saint Moritz