We're currently not using schemas on our website. How important is it? And are websites across the globe using it?

[Shreyans92]

Schemas looks like an important thing when it comes to structuring your website and ensuring the crawl bots get all the details. I've been reading a lot of articles around the web and most of them are saying that schemas are important but very few websites are using it. Why so? Are the schemas on schema.org there to stay or am I wasting my time?

[LesleyPaone]

I would consider them important. Most of my clients are e-commerce sites and I put them on every site that I do. A lot of platforms are supporting them out of the box now, if that speaks to importance to you.

[danatanseo]

I totally agree with Lesley. You asked why so few few sites might be using them. I think it's a question of knowledge and implementation. Unless you are extremely comfortable with HTML and XML, schema.org markup can be very intimidating. It also doesn't help that Google is choosing to display only certain elements of structured data right now, and even then, it's sporadic. In fact, recently, Google went from displaying a lot of authorship information to displaying less. This is all still in experimental stages. That being said, will it go away? i.e. Is it just a search fad?

My answer is: "no," structured data (also referred to as "schema," "microdata," "rich snippets," and "microformats" ) will only become more and more important until search engine bots get better at understanding different elements of a Web page, for example, understanding that there might be a MSRP price, an "our price" and a "regular price" simply by crawling the data. Right now, bots aren't very good at that because if they crawl three prices, all they are understanding is a very basic "$10.00" -  "$8.00"  - "$7.00" - but they won't have any idea how those three prices relate to each other without schema.org markup. Or, as another example, especially for e-commerce, a product page might have many images on it. How does a bot know which image on the page is the main product image? Bots aren't quite smart enough to know this because they can't "see" a page like a human sees a page...they can only crawl code.

But, fear not! There is help! Google initiated a microdata highlighter in Google Webmaster Tools sometime last year. If you have a smaller, simpler site, you can use this tool to markup your pages with schema without knowing a lick of code. Here's how to do it: http://www.danatanseo.com/2013/08/google-finally-demystifies-structured.html

Hope this is helpful!

[Shreyans92]

Thanks for your input Dana. As you are saying that the schema.org markup is still sporadic, will it better if I wait for a couple of months before making the changes? Or is it the right time?

And about the microdata highlighter you are talking about, it'll just help the Google bot, not the crawlers from bing and yahoo, right? So wouldn't it be better if I use the schema.org markups?

[danatanseo]

Hi Pawan,

You're welcome Yes, I believe you are correct in saying that the data highlighter really only translates to Google right now. However, it seems Bing and Yahoo1 really are doing very little with structured data right now. I think it depends on your industry regarding your timeline of adding the markup. If you are in the restaurant, food or travel industry, I think you really have to start now just to stay competitive. If you're in a niche, maybe it's not so crucial. One thing's for sure, what's true about structured data now will probably be different in 6 months, so whatever you do now will need to reviewed over time, just like most anything else related to SEO There's always something new and always something changing. That's why we love it right?

Dana