Yoast introdutce a rewritten Schema structured data implementation with their Yoast SEO 11.0 update on Tuesday. The aim of the SEO tool implementation is to stream structured data entry for users and tie Schema pieces together to provide more context for search engines.
Adding Schema markup won’t improve your search rankings, but it may improve how your listings appear.
Any Business owner and publisher who uses the WordPress CMS and Yoast SEO plugin (including the free version) is going to 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).
In the long term, by providing more machine-readable information, this could 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 issue with fragmented Schema is that search engines have more troubles interpreting it. The more Schema markup is used, pages with disparate Schema blocks could become much more commonplace.
This will inevitably cause issues for search engines that, as an example, aren’t able to discern the main product from products that are related. According to Yoast, 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.”