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Google Rich Snippets, schema.org and RDFa

07/05/2014 - Digital Marketing

Prompted by one of our clients and an article on eConsultancy, we’ve done some digging on where Drupal is at with schema.org.

Schema.org is a shared markup vocabulary recognised by search engines, to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use to create On-page markup. In turn this enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Whilst the exact level of benefits from using schema is a hot topic of debate, it is generally accepted that it's a good thing in general (as it helps relevancy) and most likely benefits ranking.

A man pointing a a tablet device, on a table

The eConsultancy article pointed out that only a tiny proportion of sites use schema.org mark up to produce rich snippets on Google search results.

Meanwhile, Drupal has a v7 schema.org contrib module that works with RDF https://drupal.org/project/schemaorg. Rich data framework with attributes (RDFa) is a developing web standard, and part of Google and Facebook open graph strategies. RDFa lite 1.1 will be part of Drupal 8 core.

It turns out that even though Google says it supports RDFa lite 1.1, it does actually produce rich snippets from the Drupal 7 core/schema.org module markup http://manu.sporny.org/2012/google-indexing-schema-rdfa/

Here’s a rich data framework (RDF) primer http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-primer/

So we’re going to try a rich snippet for events (hopefully with book tickets/ performance details) using the schema.org module and look to include it in our builds as standard (as we do with meta tags and XML sitemap).

We'll update this post once we get that underway and hopefully begin to see some results.