GoodRelations and schema.org

=GoodRelations and schema.org=

On this page, we will explain the relationship between GoodRelations and schema.org.

In short: GoodRelations is a powerful Web vocabulary specifically designed for e-commerce scenarios, covering business, store, product, offer, warranty, payment, delivery, and other information. schema.org is a Web vocabulary maintained by Google, Yahoo, and Bing providing a single-stop schema for a broad range of domains.

For e-commerce scenarios, both schema.org and GoodRelations can be used and are fully supported by Google and Yahoo (Bing has announced GoodRelations support recently.).

The actual overlap between GoodRelations and schema.org is very small: Only 5 of 315 schema.org classes and 27 GoodRelations classes cover the same entities.

An the best is that you do not have to choose between GoodRelations and schema.org; you can combine them to maximize the impact of your markup for the visibility in search engines and browser extensions:


 * 1) You can use GoodRelations to extend schema.org markup in Microdata syntax.
 * 2) You can use schema.org types to extend GoodRelations markup in RDFa syntax.

Important: Rich markup has more SEO effects than just seeing Rich Snippets in a search engine. They are also a very powerful means of indicating the relevance of your page for a particular query, i.e., they will be a ranking factor. This does not mean that you can manipulate the search engines to get your page ranked up for all queries, but it means that you can provide information to the search engines so that they can rank up your page for queries to which your offer is a particularly relevant match, e.g. due to

and more.
 * the geo-location of your store,
 * the countries you ship to,
 * the payment options you accept,

So don't be satisfied with your page showing rich snippets in the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool! The former can be achieved in a myriad of ways, including Microformats, schema.org basic markup, product data feeds, interaction with the Google API, etc.

Only GoodRelations gives you the level of detail to send very rich relevance information to search engines. And as a side-effect, you empower browser extensions and novel recommender services to consider your offer fairly and not just based on the price tag.

Who uses GoodRelations?
Some of the largest retailers in the world have chosen to use GoodRelations over other forms of markup, including
 * BestBuy,
 * Sears,
 * Kmart, and
 * Overstock.

Also, Volkswagen has started to use a massive GoodRelations deployment to communicate their car features to the market.

Stay tuned!

Best wishes

Martin Hepp Professor of E-Business GoodRelations Benevolent Dictator for Live ;-)