I have in a website a directory of musicians, music groups and institutions (luthiers, concert halls, etc...).
According with the official documentation of schema.org about MusicGroup, I could include also a solo musician.
My questions are:
Should I assign "Person" to solo musicians and "MusicGroup" to music groups?
If I assign "MusicGroup" to solo musicians, his/her thumbnail will be displayed in the Google search list as rich snippet? (I guess if I assign "Person" to solo musicians it will be displayed).
The same as question 2. but with music groups.
The same as question 2. but assigning "Organization" to institutions.
I am very interested in show the thumbnail in the search list, but also to give a logical and correct semantic syntaxis.
As the Schema.org documentation says, a "MusicGroup" can refer to a solo musician, and should be used. It has the benefit that you can have "album" and "track" properties that allow you to define the solo musician's recorded works (which are not present in "Person").
Probably, but that's entirely up to how Google decide to display search results for your site.
As per the answer to (2)
As per the answer to (2)
To expand on my answers to your questions 2,3 and 4:
Google only display thumbnails for search results in a few rare cases. My suspicion (Google's decision-making process is not public) is that thumbnails in search results are more dependent on having a very high-ranking website and therefore - in Google's eyes - a highly trustworthy and reliable source of information, rather than on the particular schema.org "type" you use.
Related
When selecting topics for facebook ads, many are duplicates. If my experience with databases has taught me anything, it's that humans enter data in all sorts of ways. So I guess facebook's algorithms have found 'topics' based on how humans have entered them. So I guess duplicates could result because of a trailing space or something like that.
From the UI, I cannot tell the difference between topics which appear identical, but which may have very different followings (e.g. one may have 10m associated users, another might just have 100 if it's an uncommon typo with a trailing space).
How can I view more information on facebook 'topics'? Is there an API call for this?
Example
Here is an example of a duplicate topic
Here's where the topics can be found (requires login)
NB: as a corollary to the above, when there are duplicates (or triplets) is it beneficial to select all of them, or is selecting just one enough to maximise the effect?
You can find the solution by creating an ad from the Business Manager. Short answer is that the duplicates belong to different categories.
In your case, if you look for "Sonic drive-in", Facebook will give you the following choices (see pic):
Sonic drive-in as interest (e.g. to target those who like a related page)
Stackoverflow as an employer (to target those working there)
So, it depends on what you need for your ads.
My webpage is devoted to generic places, where users vote for them, and I'm trying to make Google to show rich snippets with star-rating votes for such webpages.
I've been reading the Schema.org documentation, and found two types which can help me:
Place
Article
However, I've been browsing the webpage of Google dealing with review snippets, and they claim that publishers can "supply ratings for the following content" types:
Books
Local businesses
Movies
Music
Products
Recipes
Are such categories the only accepted ones to show review snippets?
I see some webpages using Article or just the hReview-aggregate Microformat without mentioning the type, to show review snippets.
Which would be the best solution? Place? Article? Just Microformat?
Schema.org is quite flexible to mix elements as you wish, but so far Google will handle only some specific cases, the ones listed in their reference page
On https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/ what data type should I use for an online course (such as https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/)?
If I chose the closest, say Book Reviews, will Google think my online course is a book review instead?
The types Course and CourseInstance are currently in the pending extension (discussion about the terms), and they will likely be published (i.e., moved to core) in the next Schema.org release (3.2).
If you don’t want to wait, you could use EducationEvent for specific course instances, and CreativeWork for the creative work behind the course.
Here is the doku for courses from Google.
While the actual code markup is pretty well explained, in Google developers docs, it is unclear where in a web page or on which pages the markup needs to occur and in what relation to the actual reviews that are aggregated.
For example, I see many pages around the web that are getting rich snippets with reviews, however when you visit the page, there are no visible reviews or indication of where those reviews are coming from. (Example Google search: radio connections Los Angeles )
I think this type of implementation may be against Google guidelines, but the guidelines are unclear. Do aggregateRatings need to reference where those ratings originate? Do they need to be on the same page as the individual reviews or ratings?
I'm talking in a strict 'white-hat' way, because it seems that to get the rich snippet in Google, the aggregateRatings do not actually need to reference or be connected anything and are essentially self-contained.
The Schema.org type AggregateRating doesn’t even offer a property to reference the single ratings, or to specify the source.
On top of that, not all aggregate ratings are based on ratings that are available online. Think of ratings collected per phone, paper etc.
Anyway, the guidelines for Google’s Reviews/Ratings Rich Snippets are only documenting in which cases Google Search would consider displaying this rich snippet for your page. If you don’t follow their guidelines (e.g., you don’t provide a property "required" by Google), the worst that happens is that no rich snippet is shown (leaving aside cases of intentional misleading or spamming). Google is just one of many Schema.org consumers, and there are plenty of useful Schema.org uses that don’t necessarily comply with one of Google’s Rich Snippets.
The vocabulary Schema.org does not require any properties.
I'm putting the required meta-tags into my pages and I have a list I saved from facebook's documentation at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/#types
Two problems. One is that my list of business types is, in total:
bar
company
cafe
hotel
restaurant
which is a little crazy. Every type of commercial entity in the world can be categorised as one of those five things? There's not even "store"?
That list is confirmed by this page: http://www.netmagazine.com/tutorials/optimise-your-website-facebook but my second problem is, Facebook no longer seems to be providing a list at all. The documentation says it was updated a month ago.
The tutorial holds out the interesting promise that "Facebook says that it will actively monitor the most commonly used types and add them to the list of supported og:types in due course." so it seems I can make up my own, say "store" or "supermarket" and that won't be an error.
What good or harm will it do to make up my own? What does Facebook use this metadata for anyway?
According to the .NET link article you provided, these are the types you can use:
Activities
activity
sport
Businesses
bar
company
cafe
hotel
restaurant
Groups
cause
sports_league
sports_team
Organizations
band
government
non_profit
school
university
People
actor
athlete
author
director
musician
politician
profile
public_figure
Places
city
country
landmark
state_province
Products and Entertainment
album
book
drink
food
game
movie
product
song
tv_show
Websites
article
blog
website
Now, the list is limited of course, but you can keep it generic by stating something like og:type="website" - it may sound stupid and obvious stating website as the type, but remember tht the web isn't just about web pages - there are all sorts of media to consume.
Or, as you mention, make up your own. If you're sensible about it and specify something like og:type="ecommerce", over time, this may be something others are using and will therefore become a popular choice; with the hope it becomes adopted. If it doesn't, then there's no actual harm that can come of it.
In reality, it doesn't matter what you put there and I suspect Facebook only specifies these types because it wants to know what it's working with for its advertising activities.
But Facebook isn't the only medium that will use these tags, so don't be locked into their methods only. It's best to keep it logical and sensible.
Hope this helps.