This is the archive of the goodrelations dicussion list

Dear all:

I just posted additional information on the relationship between GoodRelations and schema.org on SEOmoz. This may be of general interest, so I repost it here:


-----snip -----

I think it is utterly needed to clarify the relationship between 

- GoodRelations vs. schema.org elements
- Microdata vs. RDFa

1. Google and Yahoo have confirmed explicitly that GoodRelations in RDFa syntax remains a fully supported markup for product / e-commerce data. Bing has also just announced they will support GoodRelations in the future. 

2. Since mixing RDFa and Microdata is not recommended by Google and Yahoo, GoodRelations in RDFa is the only proper way of combining Facebook Open Graph markup with markup for rich snippets, since Facebook is not part of the party.

3. The Rich Snippets Validator (example: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heppnetz.de%2Frdfa4google%2Ftc1.html&view=) can currently show a preview only for GoodRelations in RDFa, not for schema.org in Microdata.

That means that you can currently debug your markup only for GoodRelations in RDFa; for Microdata, you have no effective testing environment.

4. Google extracts way more GoodRelations properties than listed in the short documentation on the Google site. Check here for extended testcases:

http://www.heppnetz.de/rdfa4google/testcases.html
They all validate with Google and Yahoo.

Now, the interesting thing is that you can bet that Google uses this additional information as a signal for future relevance assessment.

For instance, if you explicitly state that your offer is valid in California using gr:eligibleRegions, e.g.

 <div about="#offer" typeof="gr:Offering">

      <div property="gr:eligibleRegions" content="US-CA" datatype="xsd:string">We deliver to California!</div>

...

   </div>


then you can bet that a request from an IP in California is more likely to see this than an offer that lacks target region information.

5. Even if you want to use the main schema.org elements in Microdata syntax, you can combine them with GoodRelations properties and classes for things that schema.org does not support or supports only poorly, like

- shipping costs,
- payment options,
- structured opening hours,
etc. 

We will add respective Microdata examples to the GoodRelations documentation at 

http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1.html

shortly.



Best wishes

Martin Hepp