Google - and let's not forget Bing - officially introduced Schema.org in June of 2011, but it would appear that still the people who have decided to embrace it are still in the minority. In the year that it made it's official introduction it has evolved immensely, including new additions that don't seem to have been paid attention too.

Let's start with the myth that there is no point is using microformats because Google don't use it for rich snippets... I'll categorically mark you down as wrong now!

Indeed there was a time where this was true, but I assure you it no longer is; there are a lot of websites in different markets now that have taken that leap of faith and are now seeing many benefits in the form of rich snippets.

The following is a short list that you can see from their SERP results in Google that the evidence of the benefits that can be reaped from using rich snippets, note that if you search in Google for the any of the following what has been replaced by the basic usual Google website descriptions:

• eBay
• IMDB
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Ticket Master
• ISaveurs

As you can see from their SERP placements, it is most definitely being used by Google.

Schema.org is not a language in its own right but a Microdata vocabulary, there does still seem to be wide confusion in the difference so let me have a go at untangling those misunderstandings.

There are various languages that do the job I am discussing:

• Microformats
• Microdata
• RDFa

When you mark up any context on a page for rich snippets or indeed similar machine readable possibilites, the method of doing so is always a mix between one of these and a vocabulary. Here is an example:

itemscope and item type being the Microdata language and Schema.org being the Schema vocabulary. Google originally dropped a clanger at the same time as announcing that they were going to support the vocabulary, they also stated that they only supported Microdata.

Historically we've supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We've decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. There are arguments to be made for preferring any of the existing standards, but we've found that micodata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats, so this is the format that we've gone with.

They also stated that although they would continue to support the existing rich snippets markup, you should avoid mixing the formats together as it can confuse their parsers.

If you've already done markup on your pages using microformats or RDFa, we'll continue to support it. One caveat to watch out for: while it's OK to use the new schema.org markup or continue to use existing microformats or RDFa markup, you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers.

After hearing that you couldn't mix rich snippets and microformats or RDFa there were many unhappy bunnies, and as such Kavi Goel from Google later stated that this was a mistake and they fixed it.

There is without a shadow of a doubt that there are huge benefits to implementing Schema.org on your sites, regardless of what type of website you have, there are always ways in which you can use it, even if it's simply defining an article and the publish date.

With that being said, there are numerous other cases where you can gain even more benefits by implementing them, here are just a few ways in which the vocabulary could be applied to your site.

• Events
• Jobs
• Reputation Management
• News Sites
• E-commerce

I strongly believe that it is worth implementing rich snippets, hopefully if you are reading this part of the article then you will now know the benefits and be making plans to implement them yourself.

Wired Bean was established in 2012. We are a Sussex Web Design company operating in the South East of the UK. Wired Bean are capable of undertaking a wide range of web based projects uitlising a variety of technologies.