3 replies to this topic

[Tom Philo]

I saw on Google's Webmaster Blog (http://googlewebmast...l.blogspot.com/) about the +1 button that they have stated that they, plus Bing, and others, use the schema.org attributes of itemscope, itemprop, heading, img, paragrpah etc to add metadata within those (and other) tags to enhance the desciptions of what the item to search engines in order to bring up ehanced data in search engines.

Dublin Core metadata was supposed to do that (and I did not do anything that Dublin core recommended since it seemed to only help librarians within their closed systems and not real people on the web) and now I see that Google is recommending schema.org meta data attributes - so will the herd follow?

Do others think that this will catch on and the billions of pages will be reedited to add these into them (or only new pages?).

I can see value of doing so, but that is a LOT of work for an existing site - even my small 350 page site.

[Jill]

Do others think that this will catch on and the billions of pages will be reedited to add these into them (or only new pages?).

It's doubtful it will catch on for a very long time. Most website designers don't even know what to put in Title tags

[Ignoramus]

This is a question I’ve been pondering for the last few days.

After reading a couple of articles about the schema.org mark up I’m left with the impression that:

1. It should help the supporting engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) categorise the page (what it’s about) and may improve their ability to match it to a search query (depending on their interpretation of user intent for that query).

2. It might give you more control over the snippet displayed for your result in the SERPs although the Google ‘rich snippets testing tool’ is pretty non-committal about that.

It sounds like one of those things that might do some good, can’t do any harm, but probably isn’t worth busting a gut over.

Like you, I have a site with pages in the hundreds not thousands. Inserting the relevant mark up from schema.org on the pages that might benefit isn’t that difficult or time-consuming.

I’ll be doing it a few pages at a time – when I have time. It’s not a priority.

[suzstephens]

I began adding them to my clients' sites when I noticed that the newest version of Google Analytics includes social metrics. However, soon afterwards I began getting spam SEO emails offering Likes and +1s in quantity. So, I suspect that if they become just another venue for spammy SEO, Google will eventually begin to ignore them.

By the way, I add them to my page templates, not to the actual pages themselves. I would never try to manage a 350 page site without some sort of template system, even if it's only a rudimentary as Dreamweaver templates.