'Net Features : structured data

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.

Structured Data

Pete Prestipino — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 12:11:00 GMT

Familiarizing one’s self with the modern markup languages, semantic structures and schemas available today can yield a more engaging, easier to manage Web property. Let’s get to know markup in this edition of Website Magazine’s Small Business Lab.

Learn more now about HTML5, Microdata and the Rel=attribute now - as seen in Website Magazine August 2011 issue: Read "Getting to Know Structured Data Markup"

Microdata Wins - Schema.org Brings Richer Web

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 01:00:00 GMT

Google, Bing and Yahoo jointly announced a new initiative today at Schema.org to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages in Microdata.

For many years search engines have worked independently of one another to establish some standards in structured markup. Essentially, through Schema.org, the search engines have come together to provide support for a common set of schemas – again, that would be microdata.

In the past, there were different standards for structured data markup including microdata, microformats, and RDFa, causing confusion for webmasters which may have ultimately been the cause of the slow adoption.

WM advises you to visit schema.org to learn more as there are now schemas for hundreds of new categories including movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and others.

Google noted that it will continue to support markup on pages using microformats or RDFa, noting that while acceptable to use any of the previously supported structured data types, they advise against mixing formats as it can cause confusion for its parser.

Website Magazine will follow developments surrounding this announcement closely – so stay tuned for future coverage.