Ask HN: How can we increase schema.org usage?

4 points·brad0··3 comments

schema.org is a standard way of marking up web pages to provide machine readable data about the page.

I'm a fan of what schema.org is trying to do. The problem is that I haven't seen much adoption other than for SEO on product pages and the occasional recipe.

What are the pros and cons for sharing data using these standards and how can we incentivise people to share data that is machine readable?

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From the perspective of a person trying to promote a side project. I would want to implement a schema that would maximize the exposure of my website.

However, there is microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD. Which do I use? Then once I choose a specific schema, what are the critical elements I need to have?

Those are probable the two issues that confuse me the most.

JSON-LD has been the suggested standard since 2013 I believe. It's easier to integrate than modifying your dom just to satisfy the hierarchy of data.

I agree that there is no real information about data that is critical to provide. Validators for Google and Pinterest to validate your page but it just reports a yes/no answer afaik.

Charlie Munger would say we should look at the incentives first - so you're asking the right question.

Easy answer - make Google give priority distribution to sites that use schema.org for additional things.

That one single change would have massive results for schema.org usage.

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