When to Use Schema vs. Facebook Open Graph?
-
I have a client who for regulatory reasons cannot engage in any social media: no Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ accounts. No social sharing buttons allowed on the site. The industry is medical devices.
We are in the process of redesigning their site, and would like to include structured markup wherever possible. For example, there are lots of schema types under MedicalEntity: http://schema.org/MedicalEntity
Given their lack of social media (and no plans to ever use it), does it make sense to incorporate OG tags at all? Or should we stick exclusively to the schemas documented on schema.org?
-
Serendipitous timing - this article was posted yesterday about using mark-up, and how Open Graph and Schema.org are used, and why to use both:
Facebook Open Graph serves its purpose well, but it doesn’t provide the detailed information search engines need to improve the user experience. A single web page may have many components, and it may talk about more than one thing. Even if you mark up your content for Facebook Open Graph, schema.org provides an additional way to provide more detail about particular entities on the page.
http://searchengineland.com/schema-org-7-things-for-seos-to-consider-post-hummingbird-172163
-
I personally would use both. They way that I look at it with the OG tags is that you are controlling the consistency of the brand across platforms that you do not officially support. This is very much in my mind the same thing as making a page display correctly in older version of IE.
-
OG and Schema can live in the wild together. They are both ways to show information around the entities which they describe.
IMDB is using both OG and Schema to mark up their data:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/ -
Thanks, Craig. Do you know if any of the OG and schema tags would duplicate or conflict? I see a lot of documentation about using one or the other, but not how to use both harmoniously.
-
Thanks Keri, interesting example. While the GE Healthcare site is more commercial in intent, I like how they've treated the share functionality using the node icon. Subtle, yet shareable
-
I haven't checked in depth, the regulations are with the FDA and they aren't the most up-to-date with social media practices! No competitors are using OG yet, but their sites are also very under-optimized.
-
This may be way over-the-top, but have you checked if OG tags would violate the regulations at all, or if they could potentially be a violation down the road? Granted, even though I haven't read the regulations, I don't think it should...but it's just something I'd double-check. I could see a potential problem if the wording is ambiguous and a competitor wants to stir up trouble for you.
-
Given that other people may share those pages, I would incorporate both OG and Schema on the site.
-
Just because you can't share doesn't mean people aren't going to share it on FB. Just yesterday, I shared http://www3.gehealthcare.com/en/Products/Categories/Accessories_and_Supplies/Adventure_Series_for_CT/Pirate_Island on FB with my friends. I don't have formal experience in this area, but did want to point that out. There was an article on slate.com about the design of these, and I went looking for more information, and found that page.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Which Schema type for retirement homes?
I have a client who sell retirement homes. Their current schema for each property is LocalBusiness - should this in fact be Product schema?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adido-1053990 -
Appropriate use of rel canonical
Hey Guys,I'm a bit stuck. My on-page grade indicated the following two issues and I need to find how how to fix both issues.If you have a solution, could you please let me know how to address these issues? It's all a bit intimidating at the moment!!Thank you so much..****************************************************************************************************************************************Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL. Recommendation: We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. No More Than One Canonical URL Tag The canonical URL tag is meant to be employed only a single time on an individual URL (much like the title element or meta description). To ensure the search engines properly parse the canonical source, employ only a single version of this tag. Recommendation: Remove all but a single canonical URL tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StoryScout1 -
Schema Markup Showing On Some Pages But Not Others
We have implemented Schema markup for Reviews on product pages. All these pages check out in the Markup Checker Tool in Webmaster Tools, but out in the wild only about 50% of them are actually showing the Review markup in SERPs. Example of a page showing Review markup successfully: http://www.cloud9living.com/los-angeles/drive-a-stock-car And example of a page not showing markup in the SERPs: http://www.cloud9living.com/las-vegas/race-a-ferrari Any ideas on why some SERPs show markup and others do not? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GManSEO0 -
Schema Tag and RDF Microdata for Breadcrumbs
Can someone assist to analyse is the Schema tag and RDF Microdata is correct - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=product&Itemid=2&id=106&vid=361 - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=product&Itemid=2&id=22&vid=6 Reason - am asking is there are many sites reported on that the rich snippet though shows but in actual the RDFMicrodata does not show in on search engines many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Using Images Instead of Text to Control Keywords on Page
We have recently updated a key page on our website. It is a template page that is used many times to display search results. The words "price", "revenue", and "cash flow", "not disclosed" are used for each listing on the page -- to minimize their impact on keyword density on the page we used images for these words. Here you can see some examples: http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Florida-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx http://www.businessbroker.net/City/Los Angeles-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx http://www.businessbroker.net/Industry/Auto_Car_Wash-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx You will note these words on this page are images and not regular text. We are certainly not doing this to "dupe" the visitors or Google -- we just want to ensure that each page has keywords pertinent to what the page is about. Bottom line question -- is this an OK practice? Are we running any risk with Google by doing this? I'm particularly nervous these days with all of the Google changes. Your thoughts and guidance on this issue would be much appreciated. Thanks. MWM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MWM37720 -
Google bot vs google mobile bot
Hi everyone 🙂 I seriously hope you can come up with an idea to a solution for the problem below, cause I am kinda stuck 😕 Situation: A client of mine has a webshop located on a hosted server. The shop is made in a closed CMS, meaning that I have very limited options for changing the code. Limited access to pagehead and can within the CMS only use JavaScript and HTML. The only place I have access to a server-side language is in the root where a Defualt.asp file redirects the visitor to a specific folder where the webshop is located. The webshop have 2 "languages"/store views. One for normal browsers and google-bot and one for mobile browsers and google-mobile-bot.In the default.asp (asp classic). I do a test for user agent and redirect the user to one domain or the mobile, sub-domain. All good right? unfortunately not. Now we arrive at the core of the problem. Since the mobile shop was added on a later date, Google already had most of the pages from the shop in it's index. and apparently uses them as entrance pages to crawl the site with the mobile bot. Hence it never sees the default.asp (or outright ignores it).. and this causes as you might have guessed a huge pile of "Dub-content" Normally you would just place some user-agent detection in the page head and either throw Google a 301 or a rel-canon. But since I only have access to JavaScript and html in the page head, this cannot be done. I'm kinda running out of options quickly, so if anyone has an idea as to how the BEEP! I get Google to index the right domains for the right devices, please feel free to comment. 🙂 Any and all ideas are more then welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Do you use your own Blog networks?
Do you use a network of sites you own for links to your clients in your seo efforts? I see so many seo companies doing this from such junk sites with all their clients in the blog roll, it seems totally crazy. It seems this stuff works do any of you do this if so how do you keep it white hat?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
What are the SEO ramifications to forwarding your website to Facebook?
I have a client who wants to forward their website traffic to a campaign on Facebook for two week. I think it's a horrible idea on so many levels, but need a solid reason why. My gut says that their Google rankings will suffer, but I can't find any research/articles that state such. Help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Axis410