Bing Points Webmasters to Schema.org for a Shared Markup Vocabulary

Bing is pointing webmasters to Schema.org where they can access a shared markup vocabulary designed to help them increase their site’s “searchability” factor not only in Microsoft’s decision engine, but in Google and Yahoo as well.

In fact, Schema.org was made possible by a partnership between the three giants of search, providing site owners and developers with a collection of resources helping them markup web pages which will be more easily read, understood, indexed, etc. by Bing, Yahoo and Google.

“We’re pleased to announce Bing is joining forces with Google and Yahoo! to deliver schema.org, a new initiative, to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages,” revealed Steve Macbeth, Partner Program Manager, Bing.

“With schema.org, site owners and developers can learn about structured data and improve how their sites appear in search results on Bing, Google, and Yahoo!. We’re making the work available on schema.org, which aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages to help search engines better understand their websites.”

In the end, leveraging the resources on Schema.org will benefit users the most, since their search experience is bound to improve, especially around actually finding results that are relevant to them in the context of their searches.

Macbeth stresses the Google, Yahoo and Bing markup triumvirate is designed specifically to simplify the work that webmasters need to do as much as possible.

There will be a great deal of effort on their part, but at least they can ensure that the markup they implement, if in accordance with Schema.org, will be read by all three top search engines worldwide.

“The schema.org site is a comprehensive resource for webmasters to learn about this new initiative. One of the key benefits to schema.org is its simplicity; it includes schemas for over 100 categories, such as movies, music, TV shows, places, products, and organizations. Bing will work jointly with the larger web community and our search partners to extend the categories as appropriate,” Macbeth added.

Webmasters can already use Open Graph, microformat, or additional markup formats, but the true focus with Schema.org is to provide standardization, namely a shared markup vocabulary.

The promise from Macbeth is that Schema.org will continue to evolve, and that Bing, Yahoo and Google will take in feedback from the webmaster community in order to improve and extent on the schema collection current available.