Should a person have several honorificPrefixes?
<abbr itemprop="honorificPrefix">Prof.</abbr>
<abbr itemprop="honorificPrefix">Dr.</abbr>
<abbr itemprop="honorificPrefix">iur.</abbr>
<span itemprop="givenName">John</span>
<span itemprop="familyName">Doe</span>
Or should the title be considered as one long prefix instead?
<abbr itemprop="honorificPrefix">Prof. Dr. iur.</abbr>
<span itemprop="givenName">John</span>
<span itemprop="familyName">Doe</span>
I think it makes more sense to use only one honorificPrefix property, for two reasons:
Schema.org does not define what multiple honorificPrefix properties represent. Should the values be concatenated, or should they be interpreted as alternatives?
Depending on the used syntax, property values might be unordered. So in case the values would be concatenated, it wouldn’t necessarily be clear if it’s "Prof. Dr. iur.", or "Dr. Prof. iur.", or "iur. Prof. Dr." etc.
A good reason for using multiple honorificPrefix properties could be a case where you provide the prefix in multiple languages.
Related
I found different notations for aggregateRating on the internet.
Can somebody please explain the difference between the following two?
Notation 1
<span itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/AggregateRating">
Notation 2
<span property="aggregateRating" typeof="AggregateRating">
Notation 1 is using the Microdata format, while Notation 2 is using RDFa Lite. You should pick one format for any entities you are marking up. JSON-LD is another format option.
What you mark up, like aggregateRating, is part of the vocabulary you are using. In this case from schema.org.
It's the first time that I use Schema.org and Microdata.
I have several web pages, each giving information about a company.
Let's say I have following short-info:
<div itemsope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
Company Name: <span itemprop="name">MyCompany</span>
Address: <span itemprop="address">Teststrasse 21, CH-8002 Zurich</span>
Telephone: <span itemprop="telephone">+41792565050</span>
Investor Relations: <span ???>John Miller</span>
</div>
where ??? is a placeholder meaning I don't know what to place there.
Investor Relations always displays a name.
I could write:
<span itemprop="Person" itemscope itemytpe="contactPoint">
Is that correct? What if I also wanted to add http://schema.org/contactType to it?
As I am new to this, I am not sure what ca be nested and mixed together.
You must put the property first, properties always start with a lowercase letter and the property you want is contactPoint, so the code if you want to give no other details about John Miller would be:
<span itemprop="contactPoint">John Miller</span>
If you want to give more details about John Miller then you need to nest http://schema.org/Person inside your http://schema.org/Organization - and use itemprop for each property of the person, for example:
<span itemprop="contactPoint" itemscope itemtype=http://schema.org/"Person"><span itemprop="name">John Miller</span><br>
<span itemprop="jobTitle">Marketing Director</span> <span itemprop="telephone">212 5430543</span><br>
Both google's structured data testing tool and the structured data linter are useful if writing structured data and allow a trial-and-error approach.
According to the documentation (http://schema.org/Thing), the item type Thing cannot include a Place.
The users will be asked to add content that does not have a specific type, therefore everything falls back to Thing. So, suppose the following example. This is want I would like to have, but seems to be invalid. Is there a workaround to fix it?
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Thing">
<span itemprop="name">Eiffel Tower</span>
<span itemprop="description">Sample description</span>
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">Sample address</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Your example snippet is valid.
Simply nesting elements with itemscope/itemtype has no effect on the parsed Microdata. You have to use the itemprop attribute if you want to associate/relate the items.
So in your example, you have three items (Thing, Place, PostalAddress) which are not related in any way.
If your question is, "Has Thing a property which allows a value of Place?", the answer is no, there is no such property.
The best solution would be to have the user choose what "type" of thing they are submitting and map those to schema.org types.
E.g. if you had a drop-down list on the form they use to submit listing "CD", "Event", "Place", etc. and use the value from that form field to set the value of the main itemtype.
I'm having trouble about what to use from schema.org. I'm making a web site kinda similar to urbandictionary.com. Users are the contributors of the dictionary. Also the dictionary may include phrases like "2012 London Olympics", "MIT Dorms" etc. Whatever. So I want to add schema to the website. What should be schema-named the words/phrases and the users' descriptions?
http://schema.org/docs/full.html
Edit: layout of a sample page:
Gmail
Google's email service -user63
best email service in terms of spam prevention -user21
Gmail has a support of IMAP, POP3, SMTPi OAUTH, FRD, two-way secure login -userMew
Edit2: loyout of another sample page:
Batman 5
Upcoming movie of Batman, where Justien Bieber is going to play Joker -user43, May 2015
The opening was a disaster; Bieber slipped to the stairs and then was carried to a hospital -user22, December 2015
This movie was a disaster, a very poor quality movie -userKitten, March 2016
General
There is a getting started page in the documentation on schema.org. As you are building a dictionary, you might have an entry about a movie there (the example they are using). The markup could look like this:
<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie">
<h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1>
<span>Director: <span itemprop="director">James Cameron</span></span>
<span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
Trailer
</div>
This requires that you know that your data entry is a movie of course. If you do not know that, you could use the itemtype Article (or even Thing) and the global properties name and description.
There is also additional information about the format of e.g. dates and how to integrate invisible data using the meta tag and setting a content attribute: <meta itemprop="bestRating" content="5" />.
You can always give multiple types to an item by specifying the property additionalType. You can even extend the schema. But you should use them carefully as they are not recognized by search engines, but might get used in the future:
If the schema gains adoption and proves useful to search applications, search engines may start using this data.
In general, all this markup is optional, so feel free to mark up as much as possible, but only those parts that make sense. From the schema.org FAQ:
It is fine to mark up only some properties of an item - markup is not an all-or-nothing choice.
Markup validation
To test your markup, Google provides a Rich Snippets Testing Tool. You can paste your HTML there and see what Google extracts from it. For the above example, this is the result:
Item
Type: http://schema.org/movie
name = Avatar
director = James Cameron
genre = Science fiction
trailer
text = Trailer
href = http://www.example.com/movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html
On your page
As the information on your page is user-generated, you could let the users choose from the higher level schema.org types (Movie, Place (MIT Dorms), SportsEvent (2012 London Olympics) etc.) and fallback to Thing. Then get the data in form elements matching the properties of those types. Save the data and evaluate it when you build your dictionary pages. It is then crawled by Google (and others) and used for indexing.
For the Gmail example you gave, the markup could simply look like this (copy and paste it into the testing tool to see that Google understands the nesting):
<div itemscope itemtype ="http://www.schema.org/SoftwareApplication">
<h1 itemprop="name">Gmail</h1>
<div itemprop="comment" itemscope itemtype="http://www.schema.org/Comment">
<span itemprop="comment">Google's email service</span>
<span itemprop="author">user63</span>
</div>
<div itemprop="comment" itemscope itemtype="http://www.schema.org/Comment">
<span itemprop="comment">best email service in terms of spam prevention</span>
<span itemprop="author">user21</span>
</div>
<div itemprop="comment" itemscope itemtype="http://www.schema.org/Comment">
<span itemprop="comment">Gmail has a support of IMAP, POP3, SMTPi OAUTH, FRD, two-way secure login</span>
<span itemprop="author">userMew</span>
</div>
</div>
Additional information
For more information see the Google schema.org FAQs. Also see the Dublin Core Metadata Initiatice (DCMI) (Wikipedia) as an alternative way to semantically markup your data. They also have a wiki page for mapping between schema.org and DC.
Dictionaries can now be represented in schema.org in several ways. At the moment the google search results are not based on structured data/schema.org but that may change in future.
Most of the suggestions below are more specific types of http://schema.org/CreativeWork - which is important because it contains properties like comment, contributor, and text which are useful for user-editable content and contributions. CreativeWork also contains learningResourceType which can be set to dictionary - but this isn't a suggested value by schema.org so search engines may not know where to look.
SEO and Semanic HTML for dictionaries
Using the tags with and is the standard way of doing dictionary terms/definitions and used by the top dictionary websites, you can these tags with the schema inside them,
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Collection"><h1 itemprop="name">Dictionary</h1>
<dl id="gmail" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/CreativeWork">
<dt itemprop="name">Gmail</dt>
<meta itemprop="sameAs" content="http://gmail.com">
<meta itemprop="url" content="http://mydictionary.com/page1.html#gmail">
<dd itemprop="description"><span itemprop="comment">Google's email service</span> -<span itemprop="contributor">user63</span></dd>
</dl>
</div>
Having a separate page (or breadcrumb) for each terms seems key to ranking highly. The page name (including any bookmark) is used in the ranking, so if you search for 'ardvark' the URL http://mydictionary.com/A will rank below http://mydictionary.com/Aardvark even if both pages are otherwise identical.
Explanation of 3 Suitable schema types, including the 'official' dictionary
Method 1)
Use http://schema.org/Thing or http://schema.org/Intangible with only name (your term) and description (your definition) set. This will be hundreds (or more) of separate ones, so you could group them under a collection with http://schema.org/Collective (this how VideoGallery and ImageGallery structured data is done). The nice thing about this is it's simple and very each to show each on a separate page, which should increase hits.
Method 2)
The only way that the schema will recognize the value of Dictionary as a Dictionary is to use http://schema.org/publicationType - which can be any one of the values listed here - one of which is Dictionary. Another is Terminology.
The catch is that at the moment publicationType can only be used inside http://schema.org/MedicalScholarlyArticle - but raise a request and this may be expanded, for example to other ScholarlyArticles, or to CreativeWork (which is a parent of MedicalScholarlyArticle). MedicalScholarlyArticle is a type of CreativeWork - as explained above. If using MedicalScholarlyArticle you can nest items inside, one for each term, possibly using http://schema.org/Thing or http://schema.org/Intangible (set name and description, sameAs can be used to point to a wikipedia or urban dictionary entry that identifies the term, or to social media).
You can open an issue here to request that publicationType be added to all CreativeWork.
Method 3)
A dictionary is a book (whether offline or online), so use http://schema.org/Book and add each term within it by nesting inside. Book is a type of http://schema.org/CreativeWork and as in Method 1 you can set the terms with Thing, Intangible, or even make each term into it's own CreativeWork (just check because google may want an image for each as it does with each ScholarlyArticle).
While implementing schema.org markup for one of my cusomters online-shops I noticed a little difficulty. I think it's a missing option in the markup. Neighter offer nor aggregateOffer can handle this case correctly - although I think it is quite common.
One page for one product (let's say it's a body-lotion)
The body-lotion comes in 3 sizes, 100, 200 and 250ml
It basically has an internal productId (BL100, BL200 and BL250) for each size as well as a EAN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Article_Number_(EAN)) for each size.
How to buy: Go on the product page, chose your size, the price changes via javascript, click add to chart
Q: How can I markup ONE product with MULTIPLE sizes and MULTIPLE prices correctly?
Problems:
http://schema.org/Product suggests only ONE productID which is wrong for me. If I add three offers (http://schema.org/Offer), search engines might think, the pricing is totally weird because the same product has three different offers.
http://schema.org/AggregateOffer doesn't seem right to me eighter.
Thanks for your help.
I think the correct way to mark up this particular scenario is by nesting several Offers inside of a single Product. To add additional information to each Offer, use an IndividualProduct. I'm not 100% sure, but this seems to work well in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.
It looks like schema.org is still being updated with new ways to markup your products. The schema.org project pulled in a lot of structure from the Good Relations e-commerce product vocabulary. See E-commerce SEO Using Schema.org Just Got A Lot More Granular for more information about the new vocabulary items.
Say we want to list information about Sumatra coffee beans for sale on a website. We want to sell two different sizes (12 oz. and 16 oz.) with different prices for each. However, both product sizes should have the same images ('tis just a coffee bean) and name. The structure will look something like:
Product (name, description, and image)
aggregateRating
Offer (price and priceCurrency)
IndividualProduct (sku and weight)
Offer (price and priceCurrency)
IndividualProduct (sku and weight)
Copy and paste the following into Google's Structured Data Testing Tool to see how Google will interpret the HTML.
jsFiddle display
<article class="product" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<div class="images">
<a href="images/product.jpg">
<img alt="Sumatra Coffee Beans" itemprop="image" src="images/product.jpg">
</a>
</div>
<div class="content">
<header>
<h1 itemprop="name">Sumatra Coffee Beans</h1>
</header>
<div class="code">
<span class="label">Item Number:</span>
<span itemprop="productID">sumatra-coffee</span>
</div>
<div itemprop="description">
<p>Error 418</p>
</div>
<div class="reviews" itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
<div class="details">
Rated <span itemprop="ratingValue">4.5</span>/5
</div>
<div class="count">
(<span itemprop="reviewCount">9</span> reviews)
</div>
</div>
<div class="offer" itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
<div itemprop="itemOffered" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/IndividualProduct">
<span class="sku" itemprop="sku">scb-ov1</span>
– (<span itemprop="weight">12 oz.</span>)
</div>
<div class="price">$<span itemprop="price">14.99<span></div>
<meta content="USD" itemprop="priceCurrency">
</div>
<div class="offer" itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
<div itemprop="itemOffered" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/IndividualProduct">
<span class="sku" itemprop="sku">scb-ov2</span>
– (<span itemprop="weight">16 oz.</span>)
</div>
<div class="price">$<span itemprop="price">20.99</span></div>
<meta content="USD" itemprop="priceCurrency">
</div>
</div>
</article>
I think I would have one Product that contains multiple Offers, one per size. The limitation, of course, is that it doesn't offer a formal means for specifying multiple product IDs, but perhaps you could informally put those in the Offer's Description or URL property. That's not an exact fit, but maybe it's close enough.
Another option is to join the Public Vocabs email list (lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs), which asserts that it is "the place to propose extensions, new types, or feedback from deployment experience with the existing vocabulary" (lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2011Oct/0162.html), and propose a solution to your problem.
I think ProductGroup is the key. See https://schema.org/ProductGroup
I have a similar quest and I find it hard to match google suggestions for xml product feeds with schema.org specs. Thing is, that feed should include each sku as single feed item (each shoe size separately), yet wa sell them as one product with different sizes. Our developer uses AggregateOffer to link all the sizes together, but specs does not allow each offer item to differ or even include an sku field. Product seems to suit the case better. Both sku and +size* are valid, properties of Product. Different sizes should be linked by productGroup.
In your case I would look into ProductModel for grouping multiple Product options, as it allows PropertyValue fields. See https://schema.org/ProductModel
I would recommend a slightly different way of thinking about this particular web page. Instead of thinking about this specific webpage as a 'Product' page, think about it as a 'WebPage' type. This 'WebPage' then actually contains three different 'Products', each with their own 'Offer' and their own 'productID'. When you're saying that each size has it's own EAN, that's a big indicator to me that each size's price/size/id should be contained inside if it's own 'Product' div.
This is what Google says to do: Use itemOffered The item being sold. Typically, this includes a nested Product, but it can also contain other item types or free text.
All the different variations should be represented as separate Products with separate Offers. Use Product's isSimilarTo and isRelatedTo properties to link them together.
reference: http://schema.org/Product
Consider using "AggregateOffer" for the product, than within each offer specify each size as a different "itemOffered"
https://schema.org/itemOffered
While several common expected types are listed explicitly in this definition, others can be used. Using a second type, such as Product or a subtype of Product, can clarify the nature of the offer.