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Comment by rauljara | Hacker News Reader

All I could think while reading through the getting started was: that is an awful lot of added text. After a little more thought: that is an awful lot of added work. And while it won't be hard to have tools that make the process easier, the sort of work that goes into adding that data can never be completely automated (otherwise, we would have no need for it). Given that all the search engines will be using it, all major sites basically have to implement this or they risk falling in their rankings.

So, at the end of the day, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo just made web development more expensive. They probably also just made the web a better place, too.

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Sites that don't employ this don't risk falling in their rankings. This added data allows for richer snippets (which absolutely increase clickthrough ratio), but that won't directly make you rank higher (or lower it their absence).

If your website employs an SEO or webstandardista, you should already have your sites marked up with metadata. Reviews and rich breadcrumbs etc. have been around and supported for years now.

I suppose that since Google wants to solve these problems algorithmically first and foremost, that many of these structures already get recognized. Right now you don't _have_ to mark-up your breadcrumbs, for them to still appear as rich snippets on your search result listing. Google recognized the structure without added mark-up.

For now, I will build the new types in my CMS like a good web developer. That won't cost me any time in the future, and now I'll have a way to separate myself from those that won't add schema's or metadata to their mark-up. So, at the end of the day, I just got more expensive :)

Here's what Google Webmaster Central says about schema.org: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

"Google currently supports rich snippets for people, events, reviews, products, recipes, and breadcrumb navigation, and you can use the new schema.org markup for these types, just as with our regular markup formats. Because we’re always working to expand our functionality and improve the relevance and presentation of our search results, schema.org contains many new types that Google may use in future applications."

"Google doesn’t use markup for ranking purposes at this time—but rich snippets can make your web pages appear more prominently in search results, so you may see an increase in traffic."

Google likely uses clickthrough rate (CTR) in their algo. If your site has a high CTR, it should hypothetically rank higher, so it makes sense for them to include it in their algorithm - to the point that it can't be manipulated.

So, if the metadata doesn't directly increase rankings (which I'm pretty positive it won't), it can indirectly do so by grabbing the users eye and improving CTR, which I am most certain it will.

Some people were already doing this before, but with other formats. I did a little comparison between this and the one Best Buy currently uses, GoodRelations.

https://gist.github.com/1005688

I like this quite a bit better.

Well, the two gists don't quite encode the same information. In the schema.org example, one would still have to write code to parse the string dates. In the RDFa example, one could link several sites on the shared purl.org URL of, e.g., Friday, to answer questions like "which restaurants are open on Monday". That's the whole Linked Data idea.

On the other hand, the RDFa way is more painful when the opening hours differ between the days of the week.

The datetime attribute is designed to be easy to parse. They stick to a consistent format on schema.org. They reference ISO 8601 which is quite a bit more complicated, but hopefully they'll add something saying they only support a tiny subset of what ISO 8601 allows to make it easier to write tools.

http://schema.org/Duration

The tools aren't there yet so it's not as useful for linked data as RDFa right now, but hopefully it will be more useful soon.

I was just thinking about how I could actually see this being really awesome with something like Django.

Interesting idea; I'm a little rusty on my Django knowledge but I guess you would define a custom Model class for each data type, which in turn knows how to render itself with the correct markup.

Won't take long for someone to make a list of django models for each type

no point really, it's just a few extra attributes in the template.

I'm torn as well. It's a lot of new information to remember and creates a lot of extra work but if the content is more accessible as a result then it might be worth it. I'm also a little wary of the fact that it just seems tacked on to the HTML but I can't think of any other way to handle it.

I'm guessing this is like salt... a little dash'll do it.

I would say it's just more easy for them to parse/extract data, it shouldn't change much to the user (excerpt special cases in browsers).

I phrased that poorly. I meant accessible to the crawlers.

Adding a few tags to your HTML templates is "expensive"? With Google, Bing, and Yahoo all supporting this, I don't think it will be long before formtastic-like plugins start popping up to make this really easy.

Exactly. We already have to support multiple browsers, multiple display sizes, ARIA roles, and more. I don't mind the extra work for the handicap (ARIA), but looking up and adding all this new meta information merely for search engines is going be a pain. In the end, this extra work makes it easier for the search engine by requiring the developer to do more work. I would prefer the reverse, otherwise maybe I need to get into the search business. They are creating a standard that will make it incredibly easy for future search engines.

It depends how you present the idea of adding machine-readable information to pages. After all, nobody is forced to do it, so you need to show some benefit before the "semantic web" will happen.

Schema.org is doing it with the SEO angle: mark up your pages like this, and they'll be presented better in search engines.

With VIE (https://github.com/bergie/VIE) we take a different angle: mark up your pages with RDFa, and they'll become editable.

I added the 200 bytes/page to my ecommerce site in about 5 minutes.

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