Penalty for Mixing Microdata with Metadata

[markcely]

The folks that built our website have insisted on including microdata and metadata on our pages.

What we end up with is something that looks like this in the header:

itemprop="description" content="Come buy your shoes from us, we've got great shoes.">

Seems to me that this would be a bad thing, however I can't find any info leaning one way or the other.

Can anyone provide insight on this?

[matbennett]

Why do you think this would be a bad thing?  I'd question how much benefit will be gained in most areas by doing this, but I can't see it causing harm and it is good to get in there now with this rather than adding it later (assuming you've backed the right format!).

[RebekahMay]

I would read this post for more information: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/schema-examples

The post discusses how Google used to support 3 different styles of Markup but with the creation of Schema.org, decided to only use that going forward.  Any websites with existing markup would be okay though.

Google also mentioned (noted in the article above) that you should avoid mixing different types of markup formats on the same page as it can confuse their parsers.

[markcely]

Thanks for answering so quickly.

When I said "bad thing" I meant that I don't see how such redundancy could ever be beneficial.

Thank you for your thoughts.

[markcely]

Thanks for sharing that link. That post is very informative.

[matbennett]

Worth noting that meta desc isn't one of those 3 markup styles. it is a different thing completely so you aren't actually mixing schema in your example.