NOTE: This is not the entire FAQ, but rather a condensed version that aims to answer the most common questions people have about GoodRelations. If you don't find the answer to your question here, please see the full FAQ.
Web shop software: For many popular shop applications (e.g. Magento, Joomla/Virtuemart, Wordpress/WPEC, Prestashop,...), there exist free extension modules that make adding GoodRelations RDFa for semantic SEO as easy as a few mouse-clicks. That is by far the simplest way of adding GoodRelations to your site, so make sure you check the current list of available modules first.
If your software package is not listed there, you should ask your vendor to add GoodRelations using this recipe. We provide free support for this!
CMS or static HTML for a store, restaurant, or company site: The easiest way is to use the on-line snippet generator tool that creates the markup for GoodRelations automatically - ready for copy-and-paste. Or follow the quickstart recipe.
Markup examples for special industries are given in the GoodRelations Cookbook.
schema.org is an entry-level markup for adding structured information to sites, currently understood, in microdata syntax only. GoodRelations is a much more powerful language, equally supported by traditional search engines, but also by mobile applications, browser extensions, and novel Web 3.0 applications.
With GoodRelations, you can
More information is here: http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/GoodRelations_and_schema.org
Note: Many site owners are way too impatient when it comes to Google rich snippets. Once you added respective markup, it will often take 4 - 12 weeks until Google will turn on this search feature for your site. See also this analysis.
If you have added GoodRelations (manually or via a shop extension module) to your shop and still do not get rich snippets in Google search results, this can have one of the following reasons:
lastmod attribute or the lastmod attribute was not updated after you added GoodRelations. This attribute is important for crawlers to notice which pages need to be reindexed.site:www.example.com.When testing your site for rich snippets support, make sure that:
left|500px|Restricting Google to a particular site to check for rich snippets
Figure:Restricting a Google search to a particular site to check for rich snippets.
Google has its own document on this topic:
Note that the usage of GoodRelations shop extensions qualifies as the "few limited circumstances" in which Google accepts invisible RDFa content as "useful".
Google has said to support rich snippets in all countries in the long run. At the time of writing, we can confirm that GoodRelations in RDFa is supported for
Note that the different national versions of Google may differ in which sites will have rich snippets and which ones don't. The likely reason is that both the indexes and the filtering component for assessing the trustworthiness of the data markup may be calibrated differently per each national version.
The number of supported countries seems to have grown significantly in the first quarter of 2012. For earlier information, see here.
Microformats are a basic technique that aims at embedding meta-data about Web content in socially agreed "class" properties in HTML. While a bit simpler than RDFa or microdata syntaxes at first view, microformats have significant technical limitations:
hProduct and hListing are microformat specifications for e-commerce that suffer from the technical limitations above. While some microformat specifications (e.g. hCard and hRecipe) have gained remarkable adoption for simple data structures despite these limitations, e-commerce data is inherently more complex.
In a nutshell, GoodRelations is a technically superior technique for adding e-commerce data to your Web site. Also, the big search engines have just renewed their support of GoodRelations, while microformats are only maintained as a legacy.
XML schemas for E-Business, like BMEcat, ARTS XML, UBL are syntactic specifications for automated data interchange.
They are established techniques for exchanging business data between business partners that know each other and have manually initiated the exchange of respective files or streams. However, XML schemas don't work well for the early stages of business transactions, e.g. with new, potential suppliers or customers, because of the substantial effort for setting up and customizing a respective data interchange.
Also, XML schemas are inherently rigid, because they specify a single syntactic representation for the data.
In a nutshell, GoodRelations is much better suited for exchanging product or offer data with a huge number of unknown consumers over the Web.
If you have XML-based product or offer data, you can easily convert this into the GoodRelations format. For BMEcat, for instance, there is a powerful tool freely available.
Semantic Search Engine Optimization (Semantic SEO) is the use of techniques from the Semantic Web technology stack for
In the narrower sense, Semantic SEO means using structured data, expressed using shared Web vocabularies like GoodRelations, to improve the appreciation of your value proposition by search engines. While traditional SEO tries to bring your page on a top rank of the organic search results for a broad range of Web users, Semantic SEO aims at bringing you on top of the results for exactly those Web users that match your products or services best.
Give the huge number of sites for a given topic, it is clear that only a few can be among the top listings. It is impossible for everybody to be top dog for everybody. With Semantic SEO, you can make your message heard by those Web users who would draw the most utility of your services.
Semantic SEO can be regarded as a branch of "Data Marketing", a term first coined by Scott Brinker. See his original post "Data as a new marketing channel".
More information about Semantic SEO with GoodRelations is here: http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/GoodRelations_for_Semantic_SEO
GoodRelations is fully compatible with all related Semantic Web standards and can be used in Linked Data Scenarios, but it does not require the Semantic Web vision to become a reality. In technical terms, it is an OWL1 DL valid Web ontology available in RDF/XML syntax.
Since GoodRelations is a conceptual model for e-commerce data, it is not tightly bound to the broad diffusion of Semantic Web techniques. One could use GoodRelations in a variety of syntactical forms.
GoodRelations was initially created by Martin Hepp during the years of 2007 and 2008, based on a lot of earlier work from 2000 onwards, namely the eClassOWL vocabulary for product and services types.
Martin Hepp is now a professor of General Management and E-Business at the Universität der Bundeswehr München, where he heads the E-Business and Web Science Research Group.
The Universität der Bundeswehr München is a public research university operated and funded by the Federal Republic of Germany. As a public institution, we are financially independent from short-term commercial interests and provide the long-term stability necessary to secure your investment into adopting a new technology.
Many organizations and individuals have since supported the work on the GoodRelations vocabulary. Please honor their help by visiting this page.
