Announced on June 2nd, Google, Bing, and Yahoo introduced schema.org — a structured data markup language for web pages. Similar to the trio’s pervious 2006 sitemaps.org release, schema.org is their next collaborative effort to bring a more universal process of communicating with search engines.
Schema.org is meant to further support the push for a universal approach to communicating with search engines, as it will allow Google, Bing and Yahoo to create a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages – hence the term schema. “Schema” derives from the Greek language and means “to shape.”
The schema.org site will act as a one-stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages, to help search engines better understand their websites. Likewise, the markup types may be used for future improvements to help people find your content more easily when searching.
In essence, the markup language contains little data tidbits for web elements, such as restaurant ratings and reviews, movies and locations, and even cooking times for recipes.
Both Google and Yahoo have supported structured markup for a couple years now and schema.org has elements both Yahoo’s longtime Search Monkey project and Google’s rich snippets. However, schema.org contains a lot of new markup types from the pervious data projects.
The site offers more than 100 new types of structured data. It also ported over all of the existing rich snippets types. Here are a few of the more popular types:
According to Google, they expect to see an influx in adoption with this latest co-sponsored release:
“Adoption by the webmaster community has grown rapidly, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.” http://goo.gl/gXt9M
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