WebProNews

Tag: schema.org

  • Bing Wants To Better Surface Mobile Apps

    Bing Wants To Better Surface Mobile Apps

    Bing is trying to make it easier for mobile application developers to get their apps found in search results. It’s expanding its “Actions Intelligence” to Bing and other Bing-powered search products, such as Cortana, and creating a “massive” index of apps and app actions.

    To make it easier for developers to participate, it’s utilizing standardized markup, which developers can use on their websites to establish the link between content and apps and between content entities and the actions that apps perform on them. Bing is utilizing App Links, which Facebook launched last year as an open source project, and Schema.org.

    They have an new tool in the Bing Webmaster Tools pubic tools area. It’s called the Applinks Markup tester, and shows you how Bing extracts the App Links data from your page and performs a validation process.

    “Establishing a link between apps and your content is not where it stops,” says Vincent Wehren, Product Lead Webmaster and Publisher Experiences at Bing. “More likely than not, searchers are trying to perform an action, complete a task using your app. So how can we establish the relationship between the content (entity), the task (action), and the provider (app) that can complete the task? The Bing intelligence platform is already pretty good at inferring some of this information based on its understanding of your site, but as always, being explicit about these things from the publisher side gives you an edge. Your tool of choice in this case: schema.org.”

    “Expressing the relationship between entity, action, and your app using schema.org is a bit more involved than App Links markup, but it is extremely powerful in that it allows your web page as well as app to rank a whole new range of entity action-oriented queries,” he says. “Naturally, your app developer needs to do also do some work to open the app with in the right location, and this work is usually specific to the platform or device. I dedicated a section of my App Discovery talk at Build 2015 to this very topic. The talk was geared towards enabling app deep linking and app actions on Windows 10 and Cortana. However, the applinks.org website has detailed instructions on the navigation protocol on iOS and Androidas well and Bing is creating an app index that covers all of these platforms.”

    Read this blog post for much more on implementing all of this.

    Bing has already started analyzing the web for App Links and actions markup, and is telling people to get started right away. It’s also readying mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, not unlike Google, which recently announced app indexing as a ranking signal on Android devices.

    Image via Bing

  • Google Makes It Easier For People To Search For Your Content

    Google announced that it’s now showing a new and improved sitelinks search box within search results, which will make it easier to find specific content on third-party websites from Google itself.

    The box is more prominent, and supports autocomplete. Here’s what it looks like for YouTube:

    You can mark up your own site so that Google has the ability to display a similar functionality for your content. Google explains:

    You need to have a working site-specific search engine for your site. If you already have one, you can let us know by marking up your homepage as a schema.org/WebSite entity with the potentialAction property of theschema.org/SearchAction markup. You can use JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa to do this; check out the full implementation details on our developer site.

    If you implement the markup on your site, users will have the ability to jump directly from the sitelinks search box to your site’s search results page. If we don’t find any markup, we’ll show them a Google search results page for the corresponding site: query, as we’ve done until now.

    More on the markup can be found on Google’s Developers site.

    Image via Google

  • Schema.org Enters Its ‘Next Chapter’

    Schema.org Enters Its ‘Next Chapter’

    In 2011, Google, Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo, the big three search engines (Yandex later joined), teamed up to launch Schema.org, an initiative to support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on webpages.

    This week, the companies announced the introduction of vocabulary to let sites describe actions they enable and how said actions can be invoked.

    “When we launched schema.org almost 3 years ago, our main focus was on providing vocabularies for describing entities — people, places, movies, restaurants, … But the Web is not just about static descriptions of entities. It is about taking action on these entities — from making a reservation to watching a movie to commenting on a post,” says a blog post from Google’s Jason Douglas and Sam Goto, Microsoft’s Steve Macbeth and Jason Johnson, Yandex’s Alexander Shubin, and Yahoo’s Peter Mika.

    They refer to the new vocabulary as “the next chapter of schema.org and structured data on the web.”

    “The new actions vocabulary is the result of over two years of intense collaboration and debate amongst the schema.org partners and the larger Web community,” they write. “Many thanks to all those who participated in these discussions, in particular to members of the Web Schemas and Hydra groups at W3C. We are hopeful that these additions to schema.org will help unleash new categories of applications.”

    A couple years ago, Google’s Matt Cutts put out a video discussing schema.org markup as a ranking signal.

    “Just because you implement schema.org doesn’t mean you necessarily rank higher,” he said. “But there are some corner cases like if you were to type in ‘lasagna,’ and then click over on the left-hand side and click on ‘recipes,’ that’s the sort of thing where using schema.org markup might help, because then you’re more likely to be showing up in that at all. So there are some cases where it can be helpful to use schema.org markup.”

    Here’s an overview document that covers what exactly is changing.

    In February, Schema.org introduced sorts vocabulary. A couple months prior to that, it announced markup for TV and radio.

    Via SemanticWeb

    Image via Schema.org

  • Google Wants To Get Better At Indexing Your Business Info

    Google has released some recommendations for webmastesr to help them get the search engine to identify and surface business info like phone numbers, business locations, and opening hours. They also launched support for schema.org to help specify preferred phone numbers using structured data markup.

    “Many people also turn to Google to find and discover local businesses, and the best information is often on a website’s contact us or branch locator page. These location pages typically include the address of the business, the phone number, opening hours, and other information,” says Google in a blog post.

    “In addition to building great location pages, businesses are encouraged to continue using Places for Business, which is a fast and easy way to update your information across Google’s service such as Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph and AdWords campaigns,” it adds.

    You can find the recommendations for location pages for local businesses and organizations here. It goes into how to have each location’s info accessible, how to let Googlebot discover, crawl and index location pages, Havascript and other page assets, how location info should be presented, and using schema.org markup.

    Schema.org supports four types of phone numbers: customer service, technical support, billing support, bill payment. For each one, you must indicate if it’s toll-free, suitable for the hearing-impaired, and whether it’s global or only for specific countries. More on all this here.

    Image via Google

  • Matt Cutts On Schema.org Markup As A Ranking Signal

    In 2011, Google teamed up with Microsoft and Yahoo to launch schema.org, an initiative to support a common set of schemas for structured data markup. You might wonder whether or not implementing these schemas may influence your ranking in Google (or the other search engines, for that matter).

    Google’s Matt Cutts posted a new Webmaster Help video talking about this, responding to a user-submitted question:

    I know rich snippets can increase CTR for my mention on a SERP. But is the use of schema.org code beneficial for my actual positions on the SERPs as well?

    “On one hand, I wouldn’t necessarily count on that….Just because you implement schema.org doesn’t mean you necessarily rank higher. But there are some corner cases like if you were to type in ‘lasagna,’ and then click over on the left-hand side and click on ‘recipes,’ that’s the sort of thing where using schema.org markup might help, because then you’re more likely to be showing up in that at all. So there are some cases where it can be helpful to use schema.org markup.”

    “I wouldn’t necessarily count on that giving you any sort of ranking boost…I’m not going to take it off the table, but for example, it might make sense in some of those specific topic areas, but just because somebody implements schema.org markup, that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily and automatically a better site, so I wouldn’t count on that giving you a good ranking boost, although it can be a good idea to markup things in a rich structure just because, you know, then different people can slice and dice and find your site more easily if they are doing more digging.”

    Let’s put it this way: it seems unlikely that it will hurt your rankings.

  • Video Markup Hits Schema.org (Google, Bing, Yahoo)

    Last year, Google, Bing and Yahoo teamed up to announced schema.org, an initiative to supporta a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.

    Schema.org got some rich snippet markup for music a couple months later, which servies like MySpace, Rhapsody and ReverbNation immediately started implementing.

    Google announced today that the trio of companies have no launched a new video markup. Google product manager Henry Zhang writes on the Webmaster Central Blog, “Adding schema.org video markup is just like adding any other schema.org data. Simply define an itemscope, an itemtype=”http://schema.org/VideoObject”, and make sure to set the name, description, and thumbnailURL properties. You’ll also need either the embedURL — the location of the video player — or the contentURL — the location of the video file.”

    In the post, he shares an example of what a typical video player with markup might look like.

    “Using schema.org markup will not affect any Video Sitemaps or mRSS feeds you’re already using,” says Zhang. “In fact, we still recommend that you also use a Video Sitemap because it alerts us of any new or updated videos faster and provides advanced functionality such as country and platform restrictions.”

    “Since this means that there are now a number of ways to tell Google about your videos, choosing the right format can seem difficult,” he adds. “In order to make the video indexing process as easy as possible, we’ve put together a series of videos and articles about video indexing in our new Webmasters EDU microsite.”

    The relevant section on the Schema.org site is here.

  • Google Launches Rich Snippets for Music

    Google announced that it has launched rich snippets for music. This allows webmasters to mark up pages using the music markup to allow search results to display song info in the snippet.

    The feature is already being utilized by MySpace, Rhapsody and ReverbNation. Search results would look something like this:

    Music Snippet

    “As with other rich snippet formats, implementing the markup does not guarantee that your site will be displayed with the UI shown above on a given search; a variety of factors affect whether a particular rich snippet type will appear in our search results. However, having correct markup is a prerequisite for music rich snippets to ever be displayed,” says Associate Product Manager Gideon Wald.

    Schema.org offers a set of guidelines for MusicRecording Markup:

    Music Markup

    Schema.org was announced by Google, Bing and Yahoo earlier this year as an initiative to support a common set of schemas for structured data markup.

    “For now, music rich snippets will display song information when users search for artists, album names or song names,” says Wald. “We’ll continue working both on expanding our existing rich snippets formats and on creating new ones, so keep watching for updates about new types of content that you can surface for users right in your site’s snippets.”

    Google offers a rich snippets testing tool here.