Everyone with a Web page wants to get some “Google juice,” appearing at or near the top of the search engine’s results for a query. Google, working with several other search engines, has created Schema.org, a standard markup format to make pages searchable.
Just about every piece of technology bringing you this article is based on some standard. The TCP/IP standard brings the data over your connection, and the HTML standard specifies how your browser will render the page. Or you might be one of the cool kids using a feed reader. In that case, RSS dictates how this article is structured as well. If you’re a Linux or Unix user, you might even be familiar with the X Window System displaying all the graphics in the first place. And we have standards for connecting devices to computers, such as IDE for drives and USB for other peripherals. You can plug in a mouse, for example, without worrying whether it’s a PC or Mac, for example.Even the electricity powering your device is based on a standard.
It’s only logical to aply the same logic to search engine optimization, at least for sites that try to optimize themselves honestly, and don’t just plaster some ads around some garbage content. Schema.org is a joint project by Google, Yahoo and Bing to allow Web designers to describe the structure and meaning of their pages beyond the standard HTML tags. Schema already has “schemas” for things like movies and other media.
“We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful,” Google announced on their official blog. “We know that it takes time and effort for webmasters to add this markup to their pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way. That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for sitemaps in 2006.”
It’s nice to see Google working together with their competitors, realizing that a standard way to format semantic content on Web pages benefits everyone. We’ve recently covered Google with competitors to Google Wallet, Google Music vs. Apple’s iCloud, and phishing sites in Google Docs.
via: Official Google Blog
