Has anyone starting using schema.org?
-
On the 3rd June 2011 Google announced that they are going to start using Schema.
Do you think this will change the way search engines find content, from briefly looking at Schema I'm concerned that the proposed tags could just turn into another keyword meta tag and be abused.
Have you started using this tags yet and have you noticed a difference?
-
Here's a little tidbit. At SMX Advanced today, Stephan Weitz, Head of Search at Bing, confirmed two things I asked.
1. He was recently interviewed by Eric Enge, owner of Stone Temple consulting. In that interview, Stephan said that Bing is moving from how they currently interpret words in content as nouns, to where they want to understand words as they relate to actions - to understand web site intent - to then match that more accurately to searcher intent.
After I read that interview, schema.org was announced - a way to help search engines better understand the intent of the content. And those to concepts clicked in my head - so I asked him - do schema.org and their desire to understand web site intent (as described in that interview) go hand in hand? Are they directly related? He said yes - schema.org is the key to it all.
2. He also confirmed that "schema.org is not a ranking factor now, but it will become a ranking factor. THAT is huge. Why? because people will be required to implement it because failing to do so will harm their rankings. Adopting a microdata solution is no longer a "it would be nice if you did". it's going to be a standard practice.
The search engines, in one shot, with schema.org, drew a new line in the sand. Either get with the program, or suffer. Not today, but it WILL happen.
My experience with other evolving changes to this industry over the 10 years I've been involved with SEO is that when a major shift occurs, it's usually about a year before it's critical for best practices SEO.
When May Day happened, I saw the writing on the wall back then - and spent the next six to 9 months helping various clients change their site architecture accordingly. None of those clients lost rankings when Panda happened. Several clients I got who came to me AFTER panda, who were seriously harmed by Panda, saw a plunge as a result of May Day. It was the advance writing on the wall for Panda in many ways. At least in my experience.
So that's why I am now more confident than ever that people in this industry have a year to generally get on board. Those who can do it within six to nine months will have a competitive advantage.
-
Barry,
You're on a good point - it's a brand new "solution" to an age old "the search engines need help determining quality content" issue. So it's far from polished.
On the other hand, we ARE talking about gambling sites, not necessarily the lions share of important mainstream sites depending on how you look at it.
And I appreciate you saying it could be about the pain it'd be to implement. I believe that's going to ensure a LOT of sites don't get it, which means, if I am correct, those that do will have a significant competitive advantage by mid next year.
-
I don't know. I very much like the idea and to couple it with HTML5 elements, like
<header>and
<footer>, but (although I've not read everything extensively) it doesn't seen to cover every kind of website (specifically the gambling ones I work on).
There is a casino tag, but that's for a location rather than a site. I could mark up the promos as an offer, but that's not really what it's for. I could mark them up as articles, but again it's not a great fit either. And again same with product.
I really only think it'll be useful for categorizing pages which may be shown on differing SERPs pages. Otherwise it doesn't seem to be a particularly good idea to use it as a big ranking factor when not all sites can use it.
Certain elements like 'mainContentOfPage' and 'mainImageOfPage' and 'signifcantLinks' may count (and are the sort of thing all sites can impliment) but for every tag to carry a weight... I'm not sure.
Of course I may just be trying to convince myself of this as implimenting these tags on dozens of sites is not going to be fun.
</footer>
</header>
-
I believe Schema.org will be a critical aspect to SEO in 2012. It's going to take that long for the search engines to adapt their algorithms, and for use to become widespread. It will become widespread, in my opinion, for a couple very important reasons.
All three of the big three search engines got on board with this at the same time. That alone is a major signal of how important this is. People discounted sitemaps.org initially and that was only supported by Google initially. This is all three at once.
Next - I personally have already directed my agency client development teams that schema.org implementation is required - not optional - and that they have 6 months to get with the program. No wiggle room. Several other seasoned industry vets I've spoken with are taking the same action.
Schema.org is going to give the search engines the desperate help they need in better understanding content/data intent as it's meant to be intended by site owners, and matching that against searcher intent. It's going to be a way for the engines to improve the quality of their indexed sites. And amazing as it may sound, it's actually going to help them in some ways to combat spam even more than they do now. Because it's bringing structured consistency to the content of a site at a level they have not previously been able to achieve.
-
I'm still waiting to see how other sites are implementing it. I have an information site and I just can't see it helping.
However, I also have a real estate site and it would make sense to add it there. I plan on doing it but I have to do more reading to wrap my head around it first though!
-
None of my sites would overly benefit from the rewrite necessary to impliment the suggestions, however I will be looking at using it on some new sites.
You are correct in that anything users can manipulate can be abused, however it would be a reasonable effort to use the tags properly across a whole site and an extra step that's not really necessary for spammers, so while I don't think it'll be abused too much I also don't think it will be given any weight but instead simply used to sort data.
One advantage may be that you can get into other verticals with your site (as in, if there's a way to show 'events' in the SERPs) but I'm not sure if or when that would be implimented/useful.
I would certainly assume it would be too early to show any changes to a site for those that have implimented it (and if they have they're ninjas) but I would also be interested to see who is using it.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Meta robots at every page rather than using robots.txt for blocking crawlers? How they'll get indexed if we block crawlers?
Hi all, The suggestion to use meta robots tag rather than robots.txt file is to make sure the pages do not get indexed if their hyperlinks are available anywhere on the internet. I don't understand how the pages will be indexed if the entire site is blocked? Even though there are page links are available, will Google really index those pages? One of our site got blocked from robots file but internal links are available on internet for years which are not been indexed. So technically robots.txt file is quite enough right? Please clarify and guide me if I'm wrong. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
DA drop on 3rd March anyone?
Domain Authority has gone down again today (after initially dropping on the 7th February). Anyone else noticed anything? Cheers, Rhys
Algorithm Updates | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
If my article is reposted on another blog, using re=canonical, does that count as a link back?
Hey all! My company blog is interested in letting another blog repost our article. We would ask them to use "re-canonical" in the mark-up to avoid Google digging through "duplicate" info out there. I was wondering, if the other site does use the "re=canonical", will that appear as a backlink or no? I understand that metrics will flow back to my original URL and not the canonical one, but I am wondering if the repost will additionally show as a backlink. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | cmguidry0 -
Use of http://schema-creator.org boost ranking
Hello all if we use http://schema-creator.org for structured html will it increase our ranking too. has it any benefit for SEO?
Algorithm Updates | | adnan11010 -
Does it impact over ranking of any website if their same content being used some other external sources
Hi Moz & members, I just want to make sure over website www.1st-care.org , does it impact over ranking this website if the same content (of about us or home care services) being used some other external sources or local citations places. Do those published same content create any ranking drop issue with this website's and making its content strengthen week? . As I was on 9th position in Google.com before, now it has slipped to 29th position. WHY? is there content issue or anything else which i am not aware.
Algorithm Updates | | Futura
See the content used:
Home page content
About us page content Regards,
Teginder Ravi0 -
Organic Traffic dropped 50%. Anyone want to have a stab at why? (URL listed)
Just curious what the pro's on here think is the reason why our site got hammered recently. The URL is www.jobshadow.com. We've got gobs of quality content that had been ranking for quite a few keywords. Even one from Rand himself http://www.jobshadow.com/interview-with-seo-and-seomoz-founder-rand-fishkin/ Rankings for even the exact match domain keyword 'Job Shadow' have been pummeled. Anyway, we've got a pretty solid link profile I would think. We also have a very high user time on the site, thus suggesting the organic traffic was engaged when Google ranked us for those keywords. We have lots of unsolicited inbound links and even recent ones from PBS. I'm not really sure what it takes to please the "machine" at this point. Curious as to what everyone here thinks.
Algorithm Updates | | arkana0 -
Impressions & Traffic WAY Down. Where to start?
Beginning around November 1st, I began to notice a continual, gradual drop in impressions and traffic. During the holiday season we typically see a decline in business so I initially passed it off as that, but there has been no rebound and I'm really confused on where to begin looking to figure this out. Daily impressions have now dropped from 20,000 all the way down to 5,000 and it has taken a major toll on the business (see attachment for graph of this). Some Background Information: My Site has been very static for the past 8 month's (since April '12). Admittedly Overly static with very little other than a blog post here and there added. However, during these 8 month's traffic jumped 30% so we were riding that wave and feeling confident that our past efforts built a great foundation. I'm not aware of anything even remotely black hat that has ever been done. Everything is very much on the up and up and done with the user in mind. I'm unable to track anything to a Panda update due to the consistent, gradual nature of the decline. However, with some important search queries completely falling off the map, it feels to me like we are being penalized or affected by a permanent algo change. In GWMT that are a variety of important search queries that show a change of -100%. These terms do show an average position, but when I manually search for them they are no where to be found in Google search results. This is very strange to me. It feels like we've been blacklisted for some of our more important keywords. We had a major site relaunch on January 20th (a week ago). However the downward trend was in place well before this. The site is www.mycreativeshop.com To sum it up, I'm extremely confused and very concerned with what this drop is doing to the company. I've never been in this position as we've worked very hard to lay a solid foundation and have always seen a continual, positive traffic increase. It then seemed to just start turning downward one day and won't stop. If anybody has some suggestions of how to try to get to the bottom of this and learn what is really taking place it would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, -J Wdab7Sk
Algorithm Updates | | cre80 -
How much posting product links to Social Media affect your ranking? Any use ?
Google has Google Plus. Facebook has partnership with Bing. How much social media affect your ranking ?
Algorithm Updates | | rahijain0