Good references/studies on mark up?

[William.Lau]

I'm looking to do some study in impact across the board on structured data and would like to know if anyone has any good studies on CTR, possibly rankings and overall performance.

Any awesome links would be helpful

[DarinPirkey]

Search Engine Land did a write up a few years ago about a 30% increase in CTR for results with structured data. http://searchengineland.com/how-to-get-a-30-increase-in-ctr-with-structured-markup-105830

Here's an actual Case Study by Jason Jersey of SEOVoom on Structured data on CTR and Rankings in general http://seovoom.com/central/structured-data/

Matt Cutts covered your question in Webmaster Help http://youtu.be/OolDzztYwtQ

My personal thoughts:

I think anything you can do to help the search engines know what your site is about and how it is structured will ultimately lead to more traffic.  Matt's explanation is pretty good in that it the structured data may help you show up in certain places that you normally wouldn't show up because you didn't have it before.  NewsArticle Schema is a good example of that.  But don't let these sway you either way.  I use it as much as possible.  I also recommend using data highlighter in Google WMT if you haven't done so.  It helps Google even more.

There was a post by Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable about Google reducing Rich Snippets by 15% or so.  Matt Cutts basically said that it would remove snippets for low quality sites.  I personally think they are getting ready to ramp up testing for AgentRank and giving snippets to "authority" authors (just a hunch/guess as I predicted in 2011, after their patent update, that AgentRank (aka AuthorRank) would roll out in 2015.  http://www.vzpro.com/2012-seo-prediction/)

[William.Lau]

Thanks for the additional content. I'm working on a study to give a very solid strong case for improving structured data on one of our sites. With semantic search being more prominent than ever, I think its extremely important for every site to have mark up whether or Google chooses to show this.

Social media functions and other future applications could very well use this data to classify content of a page(see ogp.me). Perhaps even bucketing links via structured data and using it to gauge relativity of linking pages etc.

[DarinPirkey]

Came across this last night too.  http://searchengineland.com/from-microdata-schema-to-rich-snippets-markup-for-the-advanced-seo-162902

It talks about microdata schema and rich snippets.