6 replies to this topic

[jsp1983]

I'm not familiar with using metadata for my sites. I've spent a bit of time looking into it and what I've found so far isn't particularly clear. There doesn't appear to be a unified standard for implementing it (although from what I can see, Schema comes close to that).

I'm unsure of how to choose a metadata system for my site. What are the differences and how can I assess which system(s) to implement? Do sites implement more than one system?

I appreciate that Schema seems to be the most popular amongst Google and Bing, but I remember Michael Martinez mentioning that they also recommend Dublin Core - to what end, I don't know.

Does anybody have some general guidance on this or know of any discussions that I might benefit from reading?

[Jill]

I don't have an answer, but I don't believe that Dublin Core is used by anything important. (Although I could be wrong about that). It's definitely not used by the major search engines.

[Michael Martinez]

I don't recall what I might have said about Dublin Core. That must have been a while back.

Before investing heavily in modifying your content to use Schema, do some investigation to see if your competitors are. But keep in mind that early adopters might have an advantage.

At the present time the only vertical I know of which is directly impacted by use of Schema (in terms of Google search results) are recipes. That may change later this year with Google's push toward more semantic search.

[jsp1983]

I got the impression (from what I found) that its origins are in the academic community, but I've still seen it pop up in discussions about rich snippets and the like.

My assumption so far is to implement the Schema and Open Graph systems for cataloguing my pages and trying to produce rich snippets.

Re Michael's point about who's using it (and thanks for replying to my thread!), none of the sites I'm competing against are using it, from what I can see. They're certainly not reaping any benefits from it in search results, anyway. Large, indirect competitors are getting star ratings showing, but none of the sites I'm competing against are.

Even if metadata for rich snippets isn't fully supported yet, this is one area where I'd like to be an early adopter, for once!

[Michael Martinez]

Rich snippets are really something different from Schema. The rich snippets are, I think, more limited in application than Schema. If you were to format all your content using one or more Schema you could -- in theory -- design your own semantic site search tool that would provide superior results to whatever Google and Bing are presently capable of delivering.

[jsp1983]

I see. I think I've misunderstood something fundamental about Rich Snippets and/ or Schema. My understanding was that implementing Schema enabled search engines to create Rich Snippets based on the semantic information provided in the Schema markup (and that they could also do the same with RDFa, Open Graph and some other formats) - which led me to wonder just how many/ which metadata formats should be considered for a site.

So if Rich Snippets are different from Schema, and Google and Bing are endorsing Schema, what is Schema for? Sorry if this sounds like I'm going round in a circle here.

[qwerty]

Schema code (and other forms of microdata) can be used to generate rich snippets, such as the number of stars given in a review, a picture associated with an article, etc., but it's up to the search engines to choose to use it for that. My company set up schema code for job postings in response to a program sponsored by the US Department of Veterans' Affairs, but so far, it hasn't changed the way any of the search engines present our information in the SERPs.

What all of this code is for is to semantically define content. You can post text on a page that looks like

Acme Products
123 Main Street
Cambridge, MA 02142

...and it's pretty likely a search engine is going to figure out that the text represents a company and its address. But if you use the schema code for Corporation and mark up the content like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Corporation">
<span itemprop="name">Acme Products</span>
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">123 Main Street</span>
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Cambridge</span>,
<span itemprop="addressRegion">MA</span>
<span itemprop="postalCode">02142</span>
</div>

</div>

Then you're explicity telling any entity interested in reading it that the text represents a thing, and that thing is a corporation, that one property of that corporation is its name, that another of the properties of that corporation is also a thing, and that thing is a postal address which has properties including its street adress, the city and state where it's located, and its zip code.

You may have a way to make use of that information for searching within your site, and maybe search engines will find a use for it as well. But they don't use it today, at least not in a way that's visible to us.

Edited by qwerty, 27 March 2012 - 06:10 PM.