Schema.org v6.0
schema.orgIt's kind of funny how specific some of those changes are. Issue #2373: Improvements around real estate description including the addition of a property accommodationFloorPlan and type FloorPlan for use when a number of accomodation entries share a common layout. Added numberOfFullBathrooms and yearBuilt. Okay then!
In general the schema markup is great though. It's semantic web stuff done right: It's not hard to implement, it has tangible benefits, and there is proper tooling around it like the schema markup tester. And best of all: While this is mainly about changing how search results look, there is nothing stopping other software from using that markup. It's really one of the positive things Google is involved in.
It's only frustrating if what you want to do is not supported. I'd love to markup my processor and graphics card benchmark results (the ordered result list), but there is nothing in the schema that would allow me to do that :/
> It's really one of the positive things Google is involved in.
Is it though? Seems to me not necessarily a positive thing. If Google can serve the information on your website already on the SERP, the user won't have to visit your website anymore.
> If Google can serve the information on your website already on the SERP, the user won't have to visit your website anymore
Isn't this the whole point of the semantic web - making information machine readable so that humans don't have to visit the web page anymore?
The trick is probably to expose enough to be useful and convince the user that you have more useful details on the full webpage. For example when I search something and get a full StackOverflow answer presented above the search results (both in ddg and google) that often leads to me following the link to read the comments and alternative answers to learn about the gotchas and nuance of the solution. Or to stay with the example of GP, you might tell google that a page is about an apartment or a hotel room with two bedrooms and two toilets, but anyone interested will still click through to see pictures and additional detail.
It also depends on the purpose of your website.
Are you publishing data to help/inform people? or do you want traffic on your site (for ads)?
Examples like Wikipedia is about sharing information, not so much about growing traffic..
> If Google can serve the information on your website already on the SERP, the user won't have to visit your website anymore.
There are lots of services where getting the information to interested parties is the goal, and getting website visitors is only useful as a means to that go, rather than the other way around.
If that's not your interest, well, no one is making you use schema.org semantic markup.
You can write your own ontologies and host them, if you're so inclined. With enough `sameAs` links it will be a part of the integrated whole.
> I'd love to markup my processor and graphics card benchmark results (the ordered result list), but there is nothing in the schema that would allow me to do that :/
You're probably one of the most qualified persons in the world to say how such a markup has to look. Propose something at public-vocabs@w3.org or ask for it on https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues?
(But of course once you do, Google - and others - could parse your data and deprive you of site visitors because they can answer queries natively)
>(But of course once you do, Google - and others - could parse your data and deprive you of site visitors because they can answer queries natively)
Isn't that basically the whole point? That information provided by sites can become independent from those sites? For scraping, re-rendering, modifying, etc
Right, but I think it's worth adding the disclaimer because there are also folks who are shocked (SHOCKED!) that something like this could happen.
But you're right, that's the whole point of schema.org.
I'm not sure that's true?
They have various values, like integers, etc all setup, They don't have a benchmark exactly, but they have Review, which can hold various values, such as:
PropertyValue or QualitativeValue or QuantitativeValue or StructuredValue
so you can record both opinion based values and discrete values about various properties. Plus Review holds an overall value(AggregateRating ).
Sure they don't have a discrete type "GraphicsCard", but they do have generalized things, with value based items you can store about a thing you are calling a Graphics Card.
So I think it's totally possible, but I've only spent a few minutes looking, so I may be missing something.
Oh, it's possible to attach the benchmark rating to a specific item. in my case I'm using https://schema.org/AggregateRating for that (since one meta benchmark result consists of several benchmark results). And the specific item is then just a Product, which is okay.
But how would you express that you have a list of those aggregate ratings, which are ordered on the same dimension? In general I'm struggling with how to create lists with the schema, and I'm not aware of them being used anyway. I might miss something.
But I think https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/2405 would cover it, a benchmark could be expressed as a ranked list type of a guide. It being an open and recent issue makes me think that probably it's really not possible to express yet.
Edit: I completely missed that this might already be merged, https://schema.org/Guide. I just missed it in the Changelog! It's part of the pending section.
I missed that as well. Glad you found it!
The amazing part of about json-ld is you can make up your own terms when you have missing terminology! And, if you care enough, you can push for them in Schema.org and get them introduced.
What if there was a kind of search engine with support for all these schemas? An open platform for interfacing with websites supporting this structued data.
I know Google supports some of them (Product, Recipe, Article, etc...). This would support all of them as well as a way to push Actions (eg, OrderAction to order food from a restaurang)
Websites would expose json+ld data instead of html and clients could decide how these responses would render and interact with.
Does anything like this exist?
Something related but executed locally: https://comunica.linkeddatafragments.org/
Not sure if it still works or not, but there used to be a search engine specifically for Semantic Web data at:
The site is still up, but I remember trying it a while back and getting a lot of errors, so not sure if it's in a usable state or not.
Is there a way for me to search what schemas are defined?
Say I wanted a Schema for what I think of as a "Protein" or "Gene", how would I know that one exists or that I should write one myself?
I created an npm library for adding some basic Schema data (along with other data) for webpages and blogpages, but I have to admit it's quite a tangled mess to figure what properties you should and what are even important. It's nice that people at Schema.org try to figure out a way to describe every relation and attribute for a webpage, but I as a developer can only see an endless chore with little idea what actually benefits eg SEO ranking and what doesn't.
It would be nice if Google could shed some light what properties they consider the most useful and what can be used for special SERP widgets. One thing that I especially was mystified by were the Actions eg ViewActions or SearchActions. Are ViewActions just specifications for viewing the page in some app? And SearchActions for showing that you have search implemented, which might be shown in the SEO result as a search bar?
I've built a similar thing in Django.
The importance of SEO for search engines is always not known, we just guess what we should do to it more pleasant for search engines.
I guess, they never tell exactly what is important because of abusers and SEO spammers, otherwise a simple library could take care of it completely. We would see web frameworks to static site generators that get the most out of it automatically. That could be a really easier world to live in.
> It would be nice if Google could shed some light what properties they consider the most useful
The structured data docs is a godo starting point [1]
1: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/article
How long until Schema.org degrades into something like The Version War?
But is it there really anyone using schemas? Until know, I've seen almost no example of real usage in production services.
Can somebody point me to some real cases?
Sure. I wrote a Chrome extension that finds recipes on websites you visit and clones them into a big modal at the top of the page so you don't have to hunt them down (they're often buried on long, rambling blog posts). It operates by looking for some divs that common WP plugins and other off-the-shelf recipe site templates use but it has been surprisingly common for me to find itemtype set to "https://schema.org/Recipe" or similar, which makes the process incredibly straightforward.
If more sites adopted the schema properly, it would also be a breeze to convert units on ingredients, extract images and instructions for recipes, and so on. Right now it's on maybe 1/3 of recipe sites I investigate. Ironically, the bigger the company behind the recipe, the less likely they are to use the standard schema.
Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
Pretty much every news site does, otherwise it won't get ranked by Google News. Example:
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool#url=h...
But is it there really anyone using schemas?
According to this page[1], "Over 10 million sites use Schema.org to markup their web pages and email messages.".
Can somebody point me to some real cases?
See this Quora thread[2].
[1]: https://schema.org/
[2]: https://www.quora.com/Who-has-examples-of-websites-which-hav...
thanks
The NHS content API uses it extensively.
https://developer.api.nhs.uk/documentation/content-api#docs-...
Schema is very popular in structured data online. Search engines use it to parse business information, reviews, pricing data, etc.
IMDB has an extensive schema. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071853
Some real use cases: bestbuy.com, target.com, apple.com, us.gov, samsung.com, canada.ca, … I could go on. I've read nearly a third of sites use it, especially the larger ones, but also sites that run Wordpress. All with different degrees of depth, but any use can add precision to search and data, that anyone (not just Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex) can use.
Any blog using Ghost, which adds Schema.org automatically.
Yoast is a pretty popular WordPress SEO tool with Schema.org support.
Any product that offers Google AMP support has to support Schema.org. Same goes for Google News.
I used to implement Schema.org for everything that was possible in my previous projects.
Now, working on a new project, I think I'm only going to stick with 'breadcrumbs' and that's it.
The thing is that I don't like how Google is evolving. The "take everything and use it for their own profit" attitude while giving less and less space to the publishers as time goes by.