Below is live coverage of the Schema.org, Rel=Author & Meta Tagging For 2012 panel from the SMX East 2011 conference.
Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments for inclusion into the live coverage. During the live event, live notes will auto-scroll with newest entries at top. After the session is complete the archive version will have the oldest entries at the top. We ask you to please excuse any typos, as these are live notes.
Issue with the live blog thing, here is a dump of the content...
We start in a few minutes...
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox) is the mod and this room is packed. Really nice to see so many people interested in this topic.;2011-09-14 17:28:18;2;
Just some info about upcoming stuff;2011-09-14 17:30:31;2;
Topher Kohan, SEO Coordinator, CNN (@Topheratl) is starti;2011-09-14 17:31:11;2;
He talks about where Microformats come from, the history behind it.;2011-09-14 17:35:01;2;
In 2009, Google started talking about rich snippets, starting off with reviews.;2011-09-14 17:36:06;2;
He shows a sample of a rich snippet;2011-09-14 17:36:32;2;
Pics and examples at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=99170;2011-09-14 17:36:54;2;
The snippets give meaning;2011-09-14 17:37:13;2;
Rel=Author is the first time they used it extensively at CNN;2011-09-14 17:37:26;2;
See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/authorship-markup-and-web-search.html;2011-09-14 17:37:55;2;
Highlights the creator of the content, allows for author to be indexed, google wants you to link to the author profile page, it is a lot to build out for CNN and could lead to big ROI;2011-09-14 17:38:51;2;
He said this alone can be a game changer in having your content be found.;2011-09-14 17:39:13;2;
The problem isn't about getting indexed, but letting the engine know what your content is about.;2011-09-14 17:39:29;2;
hRecipe - Google Recipe Search -- they run a site named Eatocracy... The snippet lead to 47% increase of recipes showing in Google, 22% increase in search traffic to those pages.;2011-09-14 17:40:17;2;
Some details at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-recipe-view-based-on-rich.html;2011-09-14 17:41:00;2;
I thoguht rel=author DID have to point to G+ page to reap benefits of it? He seemed to have said that's not the case?;2011-09-14 17:41:02;0;Aaron Friedman
@Aaron, he said no.;2011-09-14 17:41:14;2;
Then video rich snippets... in 2009 of September.;2011-09-14 17:41:41;2;
The more info we can give the engines on what that content is, the more likely the engine will return you in the correct results. Why not do it.;2011-09-14 17:42:32;2;
CNN has a lot of video, and they put video on the page. They started using Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa early on. They saw a 35% increase in number of indexed vieos in Google Video Search.. Saw 22% increase in videos showing up for targeted keywords. But they removed it, the code was too big it slowed the page.;2011-09-14 17:43:43;2;
Some Problems: Why create a new schema? We had old methods and now we need a new one?;2011-09-14 17:44:27;2;
Best time to omplement this is when moving to a new CMS, launching new template,s launching a new site, site redesign, down dev cycles.;2011-09-14 17:45:44;2;
I know he did... :) which seems to go completely against what Matt Cutts recently said about it. ;2011-09-14 17:45:46;0;Aaron Friedman
That is all for Topher. Supposedly, one of the most hated people in the room. From what I hear....;2011-09-14 17:46:47;2;
Janet Driscoll Miller, President and CEO, Search Mojo is next up;2011-09-14 17:48:24;2;
She quickly summarizes what Topher said..;2011-09-14 17:49:22;2;
Stuff they use are rich snippets, rel=author and the schema.org piece...;2011-09-14 17:49:40;2;
Rich Snippets say you get a better click through rate, but she can not confirm it. It is hard to prove.;2011-09-14 17:50:01;2;
Reviews, People, Products, Businesses, organizations, receipts, events and music are all forms of these rich snippets. Bing supports only reviews, people, and recipes.;2011-09-14 17:52:19;2;
Implementing these are simple. The challenge is scalability. Small sites, this should be easy.
Rel=author, she shows examples. The issue is it doesn't support multiple author blogs. Only works on the same site. Only works on del hosted sites.
;2011-09-14 17:55:16;2;
She shows an example of my picture in the rich snippet testing tool but how it doesn't work outside.
She then explains how to do the rel=author implementation, but I can't type fast enough to document it all. Lots of blogs documented it, here is one http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/how-to-implement-rel-author
;2011-09-14 17:59:35;2;
Next up Schema.org, it is very comprehensive…
- Person
- Organization
- Creative Works
- etc, just see schema.org
;2011-09-14 17:59:47;2;
Where do you start? Do you use rich snippets, schema.org? She is not sure.;2011-09-14 18:00:22;2;
FYI, internet issues...;2011-09-14 18:00:44;2;
The testing tool does not fully work, and she explains and shows examples as to why.;2011-09-14 18:00:54;2;
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets;2011-09-14 18:01:19;2;
He deals specifically with schema.org, regular snippets, weather, height of empire state building and stuff like that...
Do not worry about the type of markup you use. They try to pick up it all. They won't phase stuff out.
Ranking Q related to this… It is really hard for a search engine to figure out what a page is about. So anything that gives them a hint will help…
In some cases, if it is too much work for you then don't do it. But Google is forward thinking and they hope to use it.
CTR he said should increase if they have the rich snippets and the clicks are better quality clicks…
He said our latency to get the markup to show up can "take a little while" but won't say. The rich snippet tool isn't perfect and there are bugs it doesn't find, which makes some sites not showing up the rich snippets.
He said report them in the forums. But that is bull, I see complaints all the time. He said there are few complaints about rich snippets. Again, that is wrong.
They are talking about issues with Sitelinks… and the new form. There are bugs there…
I argue and argue with this guy. I bring up prayer time snippets, I bring up whitelisting, and a bunch of issues. Bottom line, it won't be an issue in the perfect Google world.
Then they discuss the new listing snippet, which has no markup.
Someone complains Google is stealing content with this by not encouraging people to click through, because they get the answer.
Sorry about the mess...
