Miva and microdata, microformats, RDFa - opinions

[PCINET - Andreas]

Hi everybody,

I'm looking for opinions of using microdata, microformats, RDFa for the product page. Is anybody using this already? We are considering a CSSUI framework with markups already included.

Thanks for sharing!

[alphabet]

Re: Miva and microdata, microformats, RDFa - opinions

I have sections on my product page that are 'Related Product' and 'Related Categories' (Related Categories are sibling categories).

Which schema.org itemprop tag would I use?

I was thinking isPartOf for the related categories, but it isn't really part of siblings, it is part of the parent. And I wouldn't want to confuse it with the breadcrumbs itemprop.

I was also thinking of gallery for the related products but the gallery tag is a descendent of the CollectionPage not ItemPage.

Andreas, I think this should be included as best practice on all frameworks and provides great hooks for different device types.

Any ideas?

[PCINET - Andreas]

Re: Miva and microdata, microformats, RDFa - opinions

Thanks for your valuable input! Let's see who else will chime in. Bruce maybe?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Miva and microdata, microformats, RDFa - opinions

too many pies...not enough fingers...sorry

[PCINET - Andreas]

Re: Miva and microdata, microformats, RDFa - opinions

You may want to use a spare finger for this stuff ;)

[alphabet]

Re: Miva and microdata, microformats, RDFa - opinions

I think I found it!

I can make them embedded items and change their scope as CollectionPage so they're not confused with itemPage properties.

1d. Embedded items: Sometimes the value of an item property can itself be another item with its own set of properties. To specify that the value of a property is another item, you begin a new itemscope immediately after the corresponding itemprop

[Kent Multer]

Re: Miva and microdata, microformats, RDFa - opinions

Can someone post a link to some good documentation on this? I'd like to do some research. Thanks --

[alphabet]

Re: Miva and microdata, microformats, RDFa - opinions

http://www.schema.org

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=146898

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

[William Davis]

Re: Miva and microdata, microformats, RDFa - opinions

Quick note, we started using microdata on our pages when it was first introduced several years ago, but we quickly had to abandon this very promising concept.

Though we think its a great idea, it does have one huge drawback, and that is the facilitating of unscrupulous website owners data scrapping your website through automation. Once these data scrapers steal all your work in creating unique content, they use the stolen data to setup an arbitrage website (those spam websites that pretend to provide; products/service for sale, and/or useful information, when in reality its nothing more than a scam to make money off of each visitor click using Google Adwords).

Here is an example of an Unscrupulous data s(ucking vampire)craper website owner -by the way, don't waste your time sending them a Cease and Desist letter to them, or their hosting company.

All the products on the first 10 pages are our unique (collectible) products; name, description, images, etc... Need more proof, checkout two of the products on the third row from the bottom up, the even stole our "Sorry Image Temporarily Unavailable" with our logo watermark.

Whats worse is that in many cases, these data scraper sites will rank hire than the original content owner's website, without any attribution,and/or even the courtesy of linking back!

Initially, Big G did not do much about it. Some people speculate that Big G was intentionally looking the other way because they were profiting from this practice.

Over the last couple of years, Big G has "tried" to crack down on these sites due to so many complaints, and conflict of interest issues allegations. For the most part Big G recently has been somewhat successful, by not displaying offending pages in their search results, instead of banning the domain name. Big G even setup a Report Scraper Pages form -I have had some success.

The other disadvantage to using microdata, it facilitates automated competitor intelligence research tools used by either your competition, or their subcontractors (SEO firms), affiliates, etc...