Schema.org

Schema.org is a collaborative community activity with a mission to "create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond."[1] Webmasters use this shared vocabulary to structure metadata on their websites and to help search engines understand the published content, a technique known as search engine optimization.

Schema.org
Year started2011 (2011)
Latest version10.0
September 7, 2020 (2020-09-07)
OrganizationGoogle, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Yandex
Base standardsURI, HTML5, RDF, Microdata, ISO 8601
Related standardsRDFa, Microformat, RDFS, OWL, N-Triples, Turtle, JSON, JSON-LD, CSV
DomainSemantic Web
LicenseCC-BY-SA 3.0
Abbreviationschema
Websiteschema.org

History

Schema.org is an initiative launched on June 2, 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo![2][3][4] (operators of the world's largest search engines at that time)[5] to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. In November 2011, Yandex (whose search engine is the largest in Russia) joined the initiative.[6][7] They propose using the schema.org vocabulary along with the Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD formats[8] to mark up website content with metadata about itself. Such markup can be recognized by search engine spiders and other parsers, thus granting access to the meaning of the sites (see Semantic Web). The initiative also describes an extension mechanism for adding additional properties.[9] In 2012, the GoodRelations ontology was integrated into Schema.org.[10] Public discussion of the initiative largely takes place on the W3C public vocabularies mailing list.[11]

Much of the vocabulary on Schema.org was inspired by earlier formats, such as microformats, FOAF, and OpenCyc.[12] Microformats, with its most dominant representative hCard, continue (as of 2015) to be published widely on the web, where the deployment of Schema.org has strongly increased between 2012 and 2014.[13] In 2015,[14] Google began supporting the JSON-LD format, and as of September, 2017 recommended using JSON-LD for structured data whenever possible.[15][16]

Despite the advantages of using Schema.org, adoption remained limited as of 2016. A survey in 2016 of 300 US-based marketing agencies and B2C advertisers across industries showing only 17% uptake.[17]

Such validators as the soon-to-be-deprecated Google Structured Data Testing Tool,[18] or more recent[19] Google Rich Results Test Tool,[20] Yandex Microformat validator,[21] and Bing Markup Validator[22] can be used to test the validity of the data marked up with the schemas and Microdata. More recently, Google Search Console (formerly webmaster tools) has provided a report section for unparsable structured data. If any Schema code on a website is incorrect, it will show in this report.[23] Some schema markups such as Organization and Person are commonly used to influence search results returned by Google's Knowledge Graph.[24]

Schema Types

There are a number of items that you can mark up with Schema on a web page. Here are some of the most popular:

  • Article
  • Breadcrumb
  • Course
  • Event
  • FAQ
  • LocalBusiness
  • Logo
  • Movie
  • Product
  • Recipe
  • Review
  • Video

Examples

Microdata

The following is an example[25] of how to mark up information about a movie and its director using the Schema.org schemas and microdata. In order to mark up the data, the attribute itemtype along with the URL of the schema is used. The attribute itemscope defines the scope of the itemtype. The kind of the current item can be defined by using the attribute itemprop.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1>
  <div itemprop="director" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
  Director: <span itemprop="name">James Cameron</span> 
(born <time itemprop="birthDate" datetime="1954-08-16">August 16, 1954</time>)
  </div>
  <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
  <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div>

RDFa 1.1 Lite

 
<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Movie">
  <h1 property="name">Avatar</h1>
  <div property="director" typeof="Person">
  Director: <span property="name">James Cameron</span>
(born <time property="birthDate" datetime="1954-08-16">August 16, 1954</time>)
  </div>
  <span property="genre">Science fiction</span>
  <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" property="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div>

JSON-LD

 
<script type="application/ld+json">
{ 
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Movie",
  "name": "Avatar",
  "director": 
    { 
       "@type": "Person",
       "name": "James Cameron",
       "birthDate": "1954-08-16"
    },
  "genre": "Science fiction",
  "trailer": "../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" 
}
</script>

References
  1. "About schema.org initiative". W3C. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
  2. "Home - schema.org". schema.org. Retrieved 2019-04-01.
  3. Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web, Google blog, 2 June 2011
  4. Introducing Schema.org: Bing, Google and Yahoo Unite to Build the Web of Objects, Bing blog, 2 June 2011
  5. "Top 5 Search Engines from Oct to Dec 10". StatCounter. Retrieved 17 January 2011.
  6. nate451. "Yandex joins Google, Yahoo! and Bing to collaborate on Schema.org - TechCrunch". Retrieved 6 July 2017.
  7. "Yandex now supports schema.org markup". blog.schema.org. Retrieved 6 July 2017.
  8. "Getting Started - schema.org". schema.org. Retrieved 6 July 2017.
  9. "Extending Schemas". schema.org. 2011-06-02. Retrieved 2 June 2011.
  10. "Good Relations and Schema.org". blog.schema.org. Retrieved 6 July 2017.
  11. "W3C web vocabularies mailing list". w3.org. 2013-07-22. Retrieved 22 July 2013.
  12. "FAQ". schema.org. Retrieved 2 June 2011.
  13. "Web Data Commons – RDFa, Microdata, and Microformat Data Sets -- Extracting Structured Data from the Common Web Crawl". 3.1. Extraction Results from the December 2014 Common Crawl Corpus. 2015-04-13. Retrieved 2015-04-13.
  14. "Easier website development with Web Components and JSON-LD". 2015-03-09.
  15. "Introduction to Structured Data". 2017-09-13.
  16. "How to add Schema Markup Data JSON-LD". 2019-09-06.
  17. "Prioritize Search To Maximize ROI Of Marketing" (PDF). 2017-01-01.
  18. "Structured Data Testing Tool". www.google.com. Retrieved 25 August 2020.
  19. "The Rich Results Test is out of beta". webmasters.googleblog.com. Retrieved 25 August 2020.
  20. "Rich Result Tool". www.google.com. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  21. "Микроразметка — Яндекс.Вебмастер". webmaster.yandex.ru. Retrieved 6 July 2017.
  22. "Bing - Markup Validator". www.bing.com. Retrieved 6 July 2017.
  23. "What is Schema Mark Up and How Can it Benefit Your Business". 2019-12-04.
  24. "Specify your social profiles to Google". Google Developers. Retrieved 2015-06-25.
  25. "Getting Started - schema.org". schema.org. Retrieved 6 July 2017.
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