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The big news yesterday from the major search engines was the launch of schema.org. This is the search engines uniting to make HTML markup for structured data to be used on the search results display easy and more manageable for webmasters.
This markup language is typically used by search engines to show richer content in the results. Like for recipe results, ratings, reviews, etc.
The full documentation is over here.
Google, Bing and Yahoo all jointly announced it together.
Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land has a very good write up explaining why they are doing this and more importantly do you need to change anything going forward.
The quick answer is if you have already done markups, you won't have to change anything because the search engines will continue to support the old markups. But if you are building out a new site you may want to adopt the new markup schema.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Cre8asite Forums.
Comments:
Penta Informatics Limited
06/04/2011 11:27 am
This is the search engines uniting to make HTML markup for structured data to be used on the search results display easy and more manageable for webmasters.
John Britsios
06/04/2011 04:04 pm
It strongly believe that it is an attempt of Google and Bing to reduce the impact of RDF and Semantic Web techniques for their businesses.
AnnMarie Knutson
10/05/2012 07:17 pm
Interestingly, schema.org has not been confirmed as being able to improve regular organic rankings (only to improve the appearance of a page ranking in the search engines), but it has been confirmed that schema.org improves “places” rankings. Since the places rankings may now contain a link to the website itself.......this is a new way of driving site traffic.