Daily Updates with RF Rizwan Farrukh
About three years ago Schema.org was introduced as the preferred markup for websites trying to communicate to search engines about what their pages were about.
However according to Searchmetrics less than 1% of websites have implemented Schema.org markup. Despite this fact, pages with Schema.org integration rank better by an average of four positions compared to pages without it.
It must be noted that this is not necessarily a causal relationship,
Searchmetrics said in its report.
It may not be the case that pages are actually preferred by Google just because they provide schema integrations, and maybe the higher rankings can be explained by the fact that webmasters who use Schema.org integrations are one step ahead of the competition due to other factors that affect their rankings in a positive way.
Google shows results with Schema markup aka “rich snippets” for more than 36 percent of keyword queries examined.
In contrast, the proportion of keywords for which no markups appear in snippets has declined, and is currently at about 34 percent,
Searchmetrics said in its report.
The most popular Schema markup categories were movies (27 percent), offers (21 percent), TV series (11 percent) and reviews (11 percent).
The research also showed Google’s propensity to show more than one type of markup in the search results. It showed that 65% of the results showed two or more types of markup.
The majority of markup displayed four to five stars.
It’s clear to see that providing the ability to rate content is rewarded positively. Only 6 percent of the reviews were bad,
Searchmetrics stated in its report.
It is unclear whether there is causation of better rankings with Schema markup it is still recommended that Schema markup be used for better communication with search engines.
It can be said that the inclusion of HTML tags from Schema.org to clearly flag up the content of a page will greatly help search engines better understand the Web’s content – and that is an essential consideration for a good ranking.
Searchmetrics said.
