Google's John Mueller said in a Google Hangout this morning at the 55 minute mark saying that Google will be stepping up their efforts around structured markup throughout the year because it benefits them in how they understand a web page.
He said, "so I suspect over the course of the year we will definitely be seeing more structured data because it really helps us a lot to understand and discover."
Here is the whole part:
(Q) Are there more plans for Google to work more with structured data?…(A) On the one hand, it is very useful for us to understand the content better. It is kind of the nature to make sure we don’t misunderstand it wrong. So from that point of view, I think it is really useful.
The other aspect of course is, the more sites use structured data, the more we can use it and highlight it more in the search results.
So I suspect that it is also an aspect there where the better we can understand these pages the more we kind of understand the details of where this page is relevant, the better we can show it in search.
So I suspect over the course of the year we will definitely be seeing more structured data because it really helps us a lot to understand and discover and it is also something that can be used by other services as well.
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at Google+.
