Its now been just over a week since the three major search engines announced a unified approach to “create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages”. The announcement made almost simultaneously by Google, Bing and Yahoo is in simple language a way of standardising markup – such as microformats – for any party wishing to utilise the schema.org framework. According to the official schema.org site the requirement for a new schema was bourne out of three main issues

• Webmasters – Schema.org provides a single resource for webmasters to go to rather than the existing fragmented approach.
• Search Engines – Provides a centralised structured approach required in order to ‘improve search’. In real terms – pages can be interpreted as required with no potential for misintepretaton’
• Users – With structured data – users will have a better experience from services such as search engines. We have already seen evidence of this via Googles Microformats adoption however further takeup of schemas.org should see this translate across multiple engines. (more…)