I’m hesitant to either use superlatives or make predictions concerning search engine innovations (I’m the first to deride commentators that use the phrase “game changer” in almost any context), but the joint announcement by Google, Yahoo and Bing introducing schema.org is, in my opinion, pretty big news.  Schema.org at once provides a mechanism by which semantic web technologies can become a lot more mainstream, and at the same time offers the possibility of superior search visibility for search marketers that embrace this standardized, structured on-page markup.

Both searchers and publishers of quality content (by which, in this context, I really mean “quality data”) stand to gain by the introduction of schema.org.  If schema.org is adopted widely, search engine users will potentially have much better answers to more complex queries, and publishers will have a mechanism to provide the search engines with much more detailed information then the engines are currently able (or, in some cases, willing) to digest.  This promise rests on the power of structured data.

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Tagged as: Bing, Google, Microdata, Microformats, Yahoo

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