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Microdata ?

helloworld

Top Contributor
Can someone using microdata give me a good explanation of it. Both in terms of hard coding and/or wp plugins. It's something I don't think I have used before or at least no intentionally.

I normally write div cards for local search but that is about it. I've installed a couple of plugins in wp but haven't gotten very far implementing it yet and would like more advice. Seems to be quite a few categories of microdata that can be selected as well?
 

chris

Top Contributor
Hi helloworld,

It's a very interesting topic and becoming more important by the day!

Microdata is one format of rich snippet, others are microformats and RDF. A rich snippet is a way of assigning meaning to a piece of data. Google seem to be pushing the use of microdata, but they all do the same thing which is to markup data using HTML. It's not visible to the user on-page, but it gives search engines more info to work with and the SERPs do look different.

Some templates will support microdata and there are a few plugins that also do. It depends what your content is, this page lists a few that Google support.

Reviews
People
Products
Businesses and organizations
Recipes
Events
Music

Source: Rich snippets (microdata, microformats, RDFa, and Data Highlighter) - Webmaster Tools Help

You can test your rich snippets here, they also have examples what they support and what the SERPs look like (it looks like a few more have added, I'd expect to see this list grow):

Google Structured Data Testing Tool

Hope that helps, I'm still getting my head around how to use it ;)

Cheers,
Chris
 

chris

Top Contributor
good links, thanks chris.

but what its doing is helping push organics below the fold :(

tim

Sure, but it's already happening.

That said, rich snippets are still organic. I reckon the future is well and truly more paid results and richer organic results.

It's an interesting topic for sure.
 

helloworld

Top Contributor
OK thanks for the feedback. I am still a little bit confused.

I understand local business I guess that is probably the easiest.

But lets take reviews/testimonials for example. Am I to just make this stuff up ? I mean sure, businesses are provided with testimonjials from time to time but rarely with a star rating ?

Take "product" data as another example. Here are the suggested fields

Name
Description
AggregateRating (Aggregate Rating)
Review Count Rating (Rating)
Rating Value Best Rating Worst
Rating Offer (Offer)
Price Availability Aggregate Offer (Aggregate Offer) Low Price High Price Reviews (Review)
Name Author Published Date Description Review Rating (Rating) Rating Value Best Rating Worst Rating

Again ?

Also a couple of years back Google places best practices was to use div cards on site. And to keep the address on the page it was linked to from places. Is this still the case or has microdata replaced this "?

thanks in advance
 

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