• What are the business benefits of using GoodRelations?
• How can I prevent my competitors from abusing my rich markup?

Best

Martin

No “spidering costs” are saved when search engine robots visit sites with structured markup, as they’re there to index the content one way or the other. Whether it’s schema.org microdata, microformats or RDFa, structured markup is a way of provisioning the search engines with more exact information about a site than can be delivered at the presentation layer alone.

Search engines use this e.g. to predict the likelihood that they should show your site in the list of possibly matching sites for a given query.

You, as a site-owner or “common man”, as you term it, get back more and more qualified traffic from the search engines.

If you do not want search engines to touch your site because you think they are evil, simply tell them they are unwanted via robots.txt.

Best

Martin Hepp

I like your analogy about extra credit. Whether employing microdata in addition to Open Graph (and, for that matter, in addition to the standard HTML meta tags) is base or extra credit really depends on who consumes the data and how the data is used.

Certainly for +Snippets it’s an either/or situation, since Google will consume and regurgitate either. On a broader scale … who knows? (Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Google Custom Search allows you to use microformats, RDFa, microdata and tags to customize Site Search results, but not Open Graph tags.) Widespread microdata adoption would settle the issue, but we won’t be calling microdata adoption “widespread” anytime soon. On the flip side, although OG adoption in the form of the ubiquitous like button is broad, most webmasters don’t pay much attention to data encoded in the underlying Open Graph tags (if they’re even aware of their existence).

So – just looking at a typical resource title – we’ve got <title>, itemprop=”name” and property=”og:title” all referencing exactly the same data. While one could see why using, say, the schema.org CivicStructure property might have a particular benefit, using different types of structured markup for the same standard data types is indeed a pain. Less like extra credit than just flat out extra work.

In particular, the Facebook snippet got mangled when you tried to have meta, micro and OG tags all at once.

Now, I was at the end of my rope at that point so perhaps I just didn’t push on through to figure out how to make it all work in harmony but … that’s sort of the problem.

Both platforms use meta and OG tags to cobble together their snippets so while the Schema stuff is interesting it’s sort of like extra credit in summer school.