It has been several weeks now since Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! introduced schema.org to webmasters. Schema.org provides information regarding the structure data markup language that has become an initiative for the three big search engine companies. While the new structure markup language does seem intriguing, it remains to be seen how various webmasters will take to the new markup.
Google introduced rich snippets in 2009 to provide a better way of structuring data on a web page. Once specific markup was added to an HTML page, Google would parse the page and provide an enhanced search result in its search results page. With Schema.org, Google has now come together with Microsoft and Yahoo! to provide a more uniform structured markup language for webmasters.
What is a Structured Markup Language?
Most websites and blogs use a database to manage the content that is displayed on web pages for the site. For blogs, elements such as post titles, author, published date, and comments are easy to identify, and are stored as such in the database.
Once the page is rendered and displayed in the browser, all those elements are simply text on the page. Now, as a human reading the page, we can distinguish between the various elements, such as knowing who the author of the page is, or when it was published. For search engines, it is a bit more complex.
Every website has it’s own look and feel, as well as different labels and headings for various parts of the pages. Because of these differences, search engines may have trouble finding specific elements that describe the structure of the page. To solve this issue, structured markup languages have been created.
As I mentioned, Google started a structured markup language in 2009, and many websites have been following that format since that time. A few weeks ago, it was announced that a more standard markup language was created, so that webmasters can now use one markup language for the three big search engines.
If you have added the rich snippets and other microformats to your existing website, Google has stated that it will still support the previous formats in its search results. Google has also cautioned that you shouldn’t mix the different structured markup languages on a page as it could confuse its parser.
How Will this Effect You?
At the moment the new structured markup language defined on Schema.org won’t affect your site. It was basically created as a standard which will be used by the three search engines, and possibly more going forward.
The markup language basically describes the structure of a page on your site, and allow the search engines to provide an enhanced result of your site in its search results. If you rank well now, then I don’t think that will change by not inserting the new markup language in your HTML pages.
I have inserted some of the structured markup language in the template of my blog, and I am interested to see how the search engines will react to the additional tags. I’m not expecting anything drastic, if at all, but I am curious as to how it will use the new tags.
Since I have added the tags to my template, if I wanted to remove them, I can easily do so by removing the tags from the two files that I added them into in my template.
What do you think of the new structured data markup language proposed by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!? Do you think that you will look at using it on your site?