Which Markup Matters? By Marshall Simmonds

Marshall SimmondsDefine Media Group, Inc.

mdsimmonds

Enhancing Search Results With

Structured Data & Markup

Which markup matters?

mdsimmonds www.DefineMG.com

Evolution of Indexation

• Crawling

• HTML Sitemaps

• XML Sitemaps – locations

– Definitions (loc, lastmod, etc)

• Images

• Video

• News

• Structured Data


Why We Do This

“Not every type of information in schema.org will be surfaced

in search results but over time you can expect that more

data will be used in more ways. In addition, since the

markup is publicly accessible from your web pages, other

organizations may find interesting new ways to make use of it

as well.”

-Schema.org FAQ


Why We Do This


Chrome


FireFox


FireFox 4 hours later


Methodology• Jan 2012- (last week) 2014

• 50K referrers p/m – 11mm referrers p/m – total ~10 billion PVs

• Seasonality was considered

• Speed of discovery / indexation

• Format Type: Schema.org, Microdata, RDFa, Data-vocabulary

• Traffic increase

• Sustained traffic

• Domain Authority


Authorship


Authorship

• Factors – site level

– Authority of the site

– “High quality content”

– Domain longevity

– Varies based on query

• Factors – author level

– Reputation – who you are, where you publish, how long

– Quality of content

– Authority of site contributing to – Guest blogging is ok!

– Varies based on query


TV Reviews


TV Reviews

0

100,000

200,000

300,000

400,000

500,000

600,000

700,000

Jan Feb Mar Apr May

2014 Search Visits

2014 Search Visits

0

100,000

200,000

300,000

400,000

500,000

600,000

700,000

Jan Feb Mar Apr May

2014 Search Visits

2013 Search Visits

2012 Search Visits


Product Reviews


0

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

100,000

120,000

Feb Mar Apr May

Schema.org Implementation 2013


Recipes


Recipe

• Specifically, for recipes, Google requires that:

• Rich snippets are currently only shown for recipes that provide at

least two of the following:

– Photo

– prepTime, cookTime, totalTime, or ingredients

– Calories

– Review


Recipe – (H Card - microformat)


Allrecipes says to SHUT UP!


Recipes


Recipes

0

200000

400000

600000

800000

1000000

1200000

1400000

1600000

12/29/2013 1/29/2014 2/28/2014 3/31/2014 4/30/2014

Search Visits

Search Visits


Article Markup

• Can encourage In-Depth categorization (with other factors

involved)

• Name, Author, Date Published, Article Body, Headline


Video

Added

• Description

• Title

• Author

• Thumbnail

• Secure_url


Results• Authorship – Slow-Medium, Sporadic Appearance – Minimal traffic impact

• TV Reviews – Fast indexation, Slower Appearance (seasonality) - Medium

traffic impact

• Product Reviews – Fast indexation, Fast Appearance – Good traffic

impact

• Recipes – Fast indexation, Fast appearance – Minimal traffic impact

• Article – Difficult to track, Doesn’t require Schema.org – Favors big

brands – Good traffic impact

• Video – Fast indexation, Very Fast appearance – Significant impact

Traffic increases YoY


Tools

• EasyRecipe Plus does the snippet check automatically as soon as

you publish a post. http://www.easyrecipeplugin.com/snippet-

preview.php

• Plugin that checks your entire site for snippet

generation: http://wordpress.org/plugins/easysnippet/

http://www.easyrecipeplugin.com/snippet-preview.php

http://wordpress.org/plugins/easysnippet/


More Tools• http://bit.ly/structureddatatools

• http://bit.ly/semsearch

• https://search.nerdydata.com/

http://bit.ly/structureddatatools

http://bit.ly/semsearch

https://search.nerdydata.com/


MOAR Take-aways

• It’s early

• One checkpoint in many

• May allow to break through the glass ceiling

• Future proofing

• Google AND Bing want it.

• Video, Product reviews – definitely

• Marathons can be fun!


Want more? DefineMG.com/blog

Marshall Simmonds

Founder / CEO - Define Media Group, Inc.

www.DefineMG.com

[email protected]

mdsimmonds

Which Markup Matters? By Marshall Simmonds

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