seo - semanticweb.com

Blekko Data Donation Is A Big Benefit To Common Crawl

Jennifer Zaino — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:09:18 +0000

Common Crawl, the non-profit organization creating a repository of openly and freely accessible web crawl data, is getting a present from search engine provider blekko. It’s donating its metadata on search engine ranking for 140 million websites and 22 billion webpages to Common Crawl.

“The blekko data donation is a huge benefit to Common Crawl,” Common Crawl director Lisa Green told The Semantic Web Blog. “Knowing what the blekko team is crawling and how they rate those pages allows us to improve our crawler and enrich our corpus for high-value webpages.”

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Google Debuts Data Highlighter: An Easy Way Into Structured Data

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:55:40 +0000

Structured data makes the Web go around. Search engines love it when webmasters mark up page content. Google’s rich snippets, for instance, leverages sites’ use of microdata (preferred format), or RDFa or microformats: It makes it possible to highlight in a few lines specific types of content in search results, to give users some insight about what’s on the page and its relationship to their queries – prep time for a recipe, for instance.

Plenty of web sites generated from structured data haven’t added HTML markup to their pages, though, so they aren’t getting the benefits that come with search engines understanding the information on those web pages.

Maybe that will change, now that Google has introduced Data Highlighter, an easy way to tell its search engine about the structured data behind their web pages. A video posted by Google product management director Jack Menzel gives the snapshot: “Data Highlighter is a point- and-click tool that allows any webmaster to show Google the patterns of structured data on their pages without modifying the pages themselves,” he says.

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Semantic Tech Checks In As The Holiday Shopping Begins

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 06:31:34 +0000

Photo credit: FlickR/crd!

With Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday behind us, and Cyber-Monday right in front of us, it is clear the holiday season is in full force. Apparently, retailers – both online and real-world – are doing pretty well as a group when it comes to sales racked up.

Reports have it that e-commerce topped the $1 billion mark for Black Friday in the U.S. for the first time this year, with Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple taking honors as the most visited online stores, according to ComScore. Consumers spent $11.2 billion at stores across the U.S. on Black Friday, said ShopperTrak, down from last year but probably impacted by more people heading out to more stores for deals that began on Thursday night. The National Retail Federation put total spending over the four-day weekend at a record $59.1 billion, up 13 percent from $52.4 billion last year.

Not surprisingly, semantic technology wants in on the shopping action. Social intelligence vendor NetBase, for instance, just launched a new online tool that analyzes the web for mentions of the 10 top retailers to show the mood of shoppers flocking to those sources. The Mood Meter, which media outlets and others can embed in their sites, ranks the 10 brands based on sentiment unearthed with the help of its natural language processing technology. continued…

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Google Introduces Structured Data Dashboard

Eric Franzon — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:58:31 +0000

Google has announced the addition of a “Structured Data Dashboard” as a new feature in its Webmaster Tools offerings. The Dashboard gives webmasters greater visibility into the structured data that Google knows about for a given website. This will no doubt come as good news to people wanting confirmation that Google was consuming the structured data being published.

Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool has been around for a while and allows webmasters to see how their semantic markup might appear in a Rich Snippet. There are tools that allow developers to test semantic markup during the development process. However, until now there has not been a good way for a webmaster to see how (or even if) Google was consuming the structured markup in a given site.

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Expert Schema.org Panel Finalized for #SemTechBiz San Francisco Program

Eric Franzon — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:42:58 +0000

Q: What do Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Yandex, the New York Times, and The Walt Disney Company have in common?

A: schema.org

On June 2, 2011, schema.org was launched with little fanfare, but it quickly received a lot of attention. Now, almost exactly one year later, we have assembled a panel of experts from the organizations listed above to discuss what has happened since and what we have to look forward to as the vocabulary continues to grow and evolve, including up-to-the-minute news and announcements. The panel will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Moderated by Ivan Herman, the Semantic Web Activity Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium, the panel includes representatives from each of the core search engines involved in schema.org, and two of the largest early implementers: The New York Times and Disney. Among the topics we will discuss will be the value proposition of using schema.org markup, publishing techniques and syntaxes, vocabularies that have been mapped to schema.org, current tools and applications, existing implementations, and a look forward at what is planned and what is needed to encourage adoption and consumption.

Panelists:

	Moderator: Ivan Herman Semantic Web Activity Lead, World Wide Web Consortium		Dan Brickley Contractor, schema.org at Google
	John Giannandrea Director Engineering, Google		Peter Mika Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
	Alexander Shubin Product Manager, Head of Strategic Direction, Yandex		Mike Van Snellenberg Principal Program Manager, Microsoft/Bing
	Evan Sandhaus Semantic Technologist, New York Times Company		Jeffrey W. Preston SEO Manager, Disney Interactive Media Group

These panelists, along with the rest of the more than 120 speakers from SemTechBiz, will be on-hand to answer audience questions and discuss the latest work in Semantic Technologies. You can join the discussion by registering for SemTechBiz – San Francisco today (and save $200 off the onsite price)

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New Resource for Web Developers – Add Linked Data to HTML with RDFa.info

Eric Franzon — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:30:57 +0000

For Web Developers who have been looking for resources devoted to adding Linked Data to HTML, there’s a new site available today: RDFa.info. Visitors are greeted with the following headline, “RDFa is an extension to HTML5 that helps you markup things like People, Places, Events, Recipes and Reviews. Search Engines and Web Services use this markup to generate better search listings and give you better visibility on the Web, so that people can find your website more easily.” SemanticWeb.com has covered RDFa’s development and use in the past and we’ve often heard from developers that they were looking for such a starting place.

Manu Sporny

Led by members of the RDFa Community, RDFa.info provides information and resources aimed at dispelling the myth that RDFa is difficult to implement. SemanticWeb.com caught up with Manu Sporny, one of the creators of the site, to learn more about its goals and resources: “One of the misconceptions that RDFa has, is being seen as a very programmer-centric extension to HTML. This misconception is unfortunate because it was built for Web developers, and with the right introduction to it, anyone can author RDFa.”

He continued, “We wanted a site that captured and taught the essence of RDFa to Web Developers. We wanted the site to gather a set of documentation and tools that would help web developers not only learn about authoring RDFa, but help them write markup, show them the result of their markup, and point out any issues with their RDFa-enabled web pages.”

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Google Announces Updates to Rich Snippets

Eric Franzon — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:49:19 +0000

Google has announced two updates to rich snippets, the enhanced format that they announced in 2009 for displaying content in search results that use semantic markup.

The first update addresses an issue raised on answers.semanticweb.com in July of 2011. Prior to this update, only some places in the world saw rich snippets in their local results. Now product rich snippets is getting global support, meaning that users worldwide will be able to preview product information in the rich snippet. Here is an example from www.google.fr:

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Adapting SEO for a Semantic Search Future

Angela Guess — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:00:32 +0000

Ryan DeShazer of Search Insider recently shared his insights on how SEO needs to adapt or in order to stay current with Google’s planned semantic search updates. DeShazer lists three pieces of advice. The first is, “Become a content strategist – technical on- and off-page factors will continue to see a decline in importance. The most compelling and desirable content will win. I can’t help but think how this new thinking gels perfectly with the concept of storytelling and content curation through social media channels. This construct would be the ideal ying-yang relationship to content marketing across search and social channels.” continued…

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OpenMenu Serves Up Structured Data Standards For the Restaurant Industry

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:57:51 +0000

What’s on the markup menu for the restaurant industry?

Among the schema.org tags for marking up web pages is one for restaurants, which includes item properties for priceRange, servesCuisine, place, and menu, among others. Restaurants that use the markup language to structure their data are promised search engine optimization (SEO) benefits when hungry consumers want to see what’s on the menu at moderately-priced nearby Italian eateries, for example. They might also or alternately use the GoodRelations ontology for e-commerce to better accommodate search engines, as well as mobile and desktop apps, with service details of hours, payment options, and daily menus that are accessible in up to 50 languages.

OpenMenu has a value proposition around structured data for restaurant owners, too: Providing increased exposure to Internet, mobile and web apps, via what it aims to be a global and open standard for storing, sharing and using their menus over the Internet. The technical details are described at its OpenMenu.org site. Initially launched in 2010, it recently updated the format to Version 1.6 and currently counts about 75,000 menus as part of its landscape – 5,000 of them actively maintained and growing at a couple of thousand a week, according to CEO and founder Chris Hanscom.

Third-party developers can harness the data too, to build applications that interact with menus, like OpenMenu Search, a way for a search engine to drill down through a restaurant’s information to the menu and menu items.

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Time to Get On With Schema.Org?

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:03:29 +0000

Need another reason for bringing semantic smarts to your web site? Maybe you can find it in a post at Search Engine Land, which includes a piece of a podcast from an SXSW session, and a transcription of it, featuring Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts (over this way).

At the session, Cutts noted that Google has been working in the last few months to level the playing field so the advantage doesn’t go to those more focused on overusing search engine optimization vs. producing great content and sites. Over the next months or few weeks it plans to announce something about this, that will involve what it’s been doing to “make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

Take that plus the past year’s developments around the schema.org Google-Microsoft-Yahoo-Yandex collaboration (see stories like these here and here and here), and the latest playing up by Google of its continuing semantic search technology efforts (see here), and it seems there’s more and more reason more closely on semantic markup as part of a solid and truly helpful SEO strategy.

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How Google’s Semantic Search Will Affect the Web

Angela Guess — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:00:36 +0000

Jon Mitchell recently looked into the implications of Google’s decision to start incorporating semantic search into its keyword search system. He writes, “This is bound to shake up the way today’s keyword-driven search engine optimization works. The essence of the SEO game is tailoring page titles, URLs, topic tags and body text to the words and phrases people use to search the Web. Google only has to match the keywords in the query to the keywords on the Web using a lexical database. That’s relatively easy, and it allows humans to game the system.” continued…

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Parse.ly Brings A Dash of Semantics To Online Publishers

Jennifer Zaino — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:25:49 +0000

Online publishers and other content providers have a new analytics tool to help them understand what their readers care about and use that information to better connect them to their sites’ relevant and compelling content. Launching today is Dash, based on the predictive content analytics platform Parse.ly. The technology crawls every article page for Parse.ly’s publisher-partners, and analyzes, in real time and at scale, the text to identify relevant topics to group related content together. Behind this lies natural language processing technology, which uses language queues hidden inside the text to determine its affiliated topics. To date Dash has extracted over 350,000 unique topics through all the URLs is has crawled during private beta for a healthy taxonomy of topics across the web being consumed by users.

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Microdata in HTML5 for SEO

Angela Guess — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:30:41 +0000

In a post that touts the value of adding semantic markup using HTML 5 microdata for SEO benefits, Ben Truyman explains, “Microdata is a component of HTML5 aimed at adding more semantics and contextual information to existing content on a page. By doing so, Microdata provides others, like search engines or browsers, with more information about the contents of a page. This allows them to handle data in new and interesting ways. For example, a product detail page may list out a product’s SKU, pricing, reviews and availability — but there’s no real way for Google’s search engine crawlers to know exactly what that information means. With Microdata, we can explicitly tell Google how much our products cost and what rating our users gave it.” continued…

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Schema.org, Microdata, RDFa, and Black Friday at BestBuy

Eric Franzon — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:00:50 +0000

Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy, has moved the proverbial ball forward yet again by creating an implementation of the schema.org vocabulary in BestBuy’s Black Friday web pages.

First, a bit of history…

Myers began incorporating structured data into BestBuy web pages in 2009. Starting initially with basic store information (hours of operation, location, contact information), Myers soon expanded the project to include product pages, music data, and the 600,000+ item product catalog. This work quickly became a widely cited use-case for semantic markup. In particular, it brought a lot of attention to the RDFa syntax and the GoodRelations vocabulary. The effort resulted in improved page rankings, richer display of BestBuy search listings in browsers, and — after putting user-friendly tools in the hands of store managers — enabled Myers to tackle the retail problem of Open Box returns.

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BREAKING: Schema.org announces intent to support RDFa Lite!

Eric Franzon — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:18:27 +0000

Last month, we reported on the new RDFa 1.1 Lite proposal by Ben Adida. In our recent podcast on Schema.org with guest Ramanathan V. Guha, we touched on the topic of RDFa Lite as well.

Today, schema.org spokesperson Dan Brickley posted that “we’re pleased to give advance notice of a new way of adopting schema.org’s structured data vocabulary. W3C’s RDF Web Applications group are right now putting the finishing touches to the latest version of the RDFa standard. This work opens up new possibilities also for developers who intend to work with schema.org data using RDF-based tools and Linked Data, and defines a simplified publisher-friendly ‘Lite’ view of RDFa.”

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