Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Ally for Standard Structured Data Markup

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have joined hands and created schema.org a new website which describes a new, standard structured data markup for websites. This microdata would be appended to a number of item types and provide additional info valuable to the search engines.

All three search engines have been providing independent tools that accomplish some of the same things, enabling, for example, recipe sites to add things like cook time, ingredients, that are invisible to the visitors but can be used by search engines to provide much more accurate results.

"This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers," schema.org reads.

"Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages," it adds.

"Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data," it explains.

This joint effort is designed to enable webmasters to start using this type of markup and make sure that all three major search engines, and others if they decided to join, will understand it.

At the moment, there are over 100 categories, or "schemas," such as movies, music, TV shows, places, products, organizations and so on. More will be added regularly, if the need arises. The group wants feedback from webmasters on new categories as well as on ways of improving the current ones or the markup itself.

Those already using some type of structured data markup, for example Google Search rich snippets or Yahoo SearchMonkey, can continue to do so as the companies said they will support existing tools. However, they encourage webmasters to switch to this new standard.