Google Offers Deep Look at Structured Data

Michael Garrity — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 16:35:00 GMT

With new websites popping up every single day, carefully crafted search engine optimization (SEO) practices are necessary for webmasters to make sure that their sites are still visible and don’t get buried by all of the new content that finds its way online every day.

When Google, Yahoo, and Bing teamed up like a search engine Justice League to establish Schema.org, they helped open the door for a whole new level of SEO that adds a more intricate layer to Web pages with the universal acceptance of standardized structured data. This helps websites further differentiate themselves from their competitors and helps return more accurate results for some searches.

Recently, Google announced a new feature as part of its Webmaster Tools offering called the Structured Data Dashboard (under the Optimization tab), which allows Web professionals to verify that Google accurately understands new markup on a site, while also detecting problems with existing page markup.

The Dashboard will provide users with three views of the structured data on their sites.

First is a top level site view that aggregates structured data information by vocabulary schema and root item type, meaning an item that isn’t an attribute of another on the same page.

In addition, the Dashboard offers an itemtype-level view that provides per-page details for each item type. Google derives this information by parsing through and storing a fixed number of pages for each site and item type, which are then stored in decreasing order based on the time in which they were crawled. The search engine will also keep tabs on all of a site’s structured data markup, and for some item types, it will even have specialized preview columns.

Finally, there will also be a page-level view that shows details about all of the attributes of every item type on a given page, and a link to the Rich Snippet testing tool for the page being studied.

Google's Author Tag – Conduits to Richer Writer Profiles

Administrator — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:15:00 GMT

This week Google announced support for “authorship markup” which will help the search engine connect its users with authors through the content those authors publish on the web. Google will ultimately use the data to help its users find content from specific authors directly within the search results but it could also help Google rank search results.

According to Google, the author tag markup enables websites to “publicly link within their site from content to author pages.” This means that if you were to use the markup, you would be able to connect all of the articles to an individual author page (which is what Google will likely include on search results pages). The author pages, according to the announcement, will describe and identify the author, and can include content like the author’s bio and photo, articles and other links.

Authorship markup uses the “rel” attribute in links to indicate the relationship between a content page and an author page. For example:

If you are already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, Google will interpret that authorship information as well.

An important “usage” cue was provided by Google in that the rel=author link must point to an author page on the same site as the content page. The benefit of using authorship markup and remaining consistent in usage is that search engines and other web services will be able to identify works by the same author more easily.

Google has worked with several sites to markup their pages, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNET, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and others. Google has also added the markup to everything hosted by YouTube and Blogger. In the future, both platforms will automatically include this markup when content is published.

'Net Features : schema.org

Google Offers Deep Look at Structured Data

Google's Author Tag – Conduits to Richer Writer Profiles