A couple of days ago Google, Yahoo! and Bing announced a new schema they have all agreed upon that will form a proposed standard for how web developers and search marketers add meta data about their content to web pages. This is not the first time these companies have worked together though, a couple of years ago they also released the sitemap standard.

So how does the schemas work? Well  first, it is build using HTML5′s microdata standard and uses attributes such as itemprop, itemtype and itemscope from the API. To best understand it, let’s have a look a a simple snippet of content for a TV Series:

<h1>Two and a Half Men</h1>
<p>Rating: 7.6/10</p>
<p>Users: 12,710 votes</p>
<p>A hedonistic jingle writer's free-wheeling life comes to an abrupt halt when his brother and 10-year-old nephew move into his beach-front house.</p>
<h2>Production Company</h2>
<p> Chuck Lorre Productions</p>
<h2>Creators:</h2>
<ul>
	<li>Lee Aronsohn, </li>
	<li>Chuck Lorre</li>
</ul>
<h2>Stars:</h2>
<ul>
	<li><a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001083/">Jon Cryer</a>, </li>
	<li>Angus T. Jones and </li>
	<li>Charlie Sheen</li>
</ul>
<p>Genres: Comedy</p>
<p>Season 1 - 22 September 2003</p>

View The Live Demo

Below is the same markup for the content but, with the schema microdata added:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/TVSeries">
	<h1 itemprop="name">Two and a Half Men</h1>
	<div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
		<p>Rating: <span itemprop="ratingValue">7.6</span>/<span itemprop="bestRating">10</span></p>
		<p>Users: <span itemprop="ratingCount">12,710</span> votes</p>
	</div>
	<p itemprop="description">A hedonistic jingle writer's free-wheeling life comes to an abrupt halt when his brother and 10-year-old nephew move into his beach-front house.</p>
	<h2>Production Company</h2>
	<div itemprop="productionCompany" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
		<p itemprop="name">Chuck Lorre Productions</p>
	</div>
	<h2>Creators:</h2>
	<ul>
		<li itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="author">Lee Aronsohn</span>, </li>
		<li itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="author">Chuck Lorre</span></li>
	</ul>
	<h2>Stars:</h2>
	<ul>
		<li itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
			<span itemprop="actor">
				<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001083/" itemprop="url">Jon Cryer</a>
			</span>,
		</li>
		<li itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
			<span itemprop="actor">Angus T. Jones</span> and
		</li>
		<li itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
			<span itemprop="actor">Charlie Sheen</span>
		</li>
	</ul>
	<p>Genres: <span itemprop="genre">Comedy</span></p>
	<p itemprop="seasons" itemtype="http://schema.org/TVSeason">
		<span itemprop="name">Season 1</span>
		<meta itemprop="numberofEpisodes" content="24" />-
		<time itemprop="publishDate" datetime="2003-09-22">22 September 2003</span>
	</p>
</div>

View The Live Demo

As you can see from the above demos, as far as the display in the browser is concerned, there is absolutely no difference and the content is rendered in the exact same way. The difference, of course, will be visible when this data is returned in a search result. Of course here, there is no one way this will be displayed by the various search engines, the only thing this gives them, is a level playing ground and an easier way to classify and therefore display results in a more meaningful and useful way.

With that said however, if you look at the two snippets of content above, there is a major difference in terms of the markup used to display essentially the same content on your website. Now, you do not have to mark up all your content as detailed as the above and, this whole strategy is not meant for every piece of content on the web but, I am sure the more you provide, the more the search provider is going to be able to do with your content and the better the presentation and click through’s to your site.

Thing is, this ads a heck of a lot of bloat to your HTML and basically goes against the idea of writing lighter web pages that makes for a faster, more responsive web. It is also extremely intensive in terms of implementation on current and new content. All and all, I am very torn on this. The concept is great but, I believe the implementation is not the greatest ever and will most likely still evolve a lot as more and more people start to use it.

Currently there is also no tools to aid in the process of adding the microdata nor, tools to test the end result of your work. Google does provide the rich snippets testing tool but, at the moment it will only linearly display what Google was able to extract from your content and report on errors but, will not actually give you a preview of the end result.  This is begs the question, is the effort worth the pay off? What do you think, will you be implementing schema.org on your content? Do you see new possibilities open up thanks to content being richer in terms of the meta/micro data? I would love to hear your opinion.

Image Courtesy : quinn.anya