Inbound Marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog

Chapter 2: Schema.org: Why You're Behind If You're Not Using It

By Craig Bradford

Editor's Note: This post was originally published on November 13th, 2011, on the The Moz Blog. Schema.org, which is approximately two years old now, includes vocabulary for health and medicine, technical publishing, genealogy, news articles, product offers, and external lists (to name a few) in addition to the examples Craig discusses. The full list of schema types is available at http://schema.org/docs/full.html.

If someone told you that there was a quick and easy way to improve the click-through rate of your search results with minimal effort, you'd stop in your tracks and give them your full attention. Yet, Schema.org and rich snippets are still horribly underutilized.

Since Google, Yahoo, and Bing officially introduced Schema.org in June (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-schemaorg-search-engines.html), it's fair to say that the motivation to implement it has been mixed. However, it has already evolved a lot (Yandex, for example, has joined the initiative), and has added new stuff that people aren't paying attention to.

Here is the part where I try to persuade you that while there are a few downsides to using Schema.org, the upsides make it worth it.

Myth: Schema.org Markup Doesn't Get Rich Snippets!

A common objection I hear from people who are not using schema is that there's no point because Google don't use it for rich snippets. WRONG!

At one point, Google ...