On Tuesday, Yoast introduced a rewritten Schema structured data implementation with their Yoast SEO 11.0 update. The SEO tool implementation aims to streamline structured data entry for users and tie Schema pieces together to provide more context for search engines.
Why we should care
Adding Schema markup won’t improve your search rankings, but it may improve how your listings appear.
Business owners and publishers using the WordPress CMS and Yoast SEO plugin (including the free version) will have access to the revamped Schema implementation. Taking advantage of it can mean:
- Your information displays correctly within a Google Knowledge Panel.
- Support for Pinterest’s Rich Pins (specifically for articles).
- Higher chances of your content showing up in a Google News listing or carousel (if you use the Yoast News SEO plugin).
- Higher chances of your product snippet appearing in Google search results (if you use the WooCommerce SEO plugin).
- Higher chances of a better local listing snippet (if you use the Yoast Local SEO plugin).
Looking into the long term, providing more machine-readable information may eventually enable software and platforms to do more with your content. Just look at how it’s made its way into Google Assistant’s news delivery.
The problem with fragmented schema
The image above shows fragmented Schema markup, which search engines have more trouble interpreting. As more people adopt Schema markup, pages with disparate Schema blocks might become more common.
This causes issues for search engines that, for example, aren’t able to discern the main product on a page from the related products. Yoast says that their new implementation provides more context and removes the guesswork for search engines.
“In our implementation, which we’re releasing today, all of the pieces ‘stitch together’: we form them into a nested structure. Without this nesting, a search engine doesn’t know how all these pieces relate to each other, and what the most important piece on a page is. Our implementation also clearly and explicitly defines the “main thing” on that page,” the company said.
About The Author
George Nguyen is an Associate Editor at Third Door Media. His background is in content marketing, journalism, and storytelling.