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IP.Board 3.3 Dev Update: Microformat and Schema Updates / SEO

Posted by Matt, in 3.3.x 08 February 2012 · 7,951 views

IP.Board has made use of micro formats and schema data since IP.Board 3.0. We added to this in 3.2 to include breadcrumb data in our navigation. This enabled Google to display our navigation links within search results.

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The schema data has been read from our page which enables the green navigation links and post/author data.

We've further extended the schema data for 3.3 which is great news for SEO:

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.


Topics and posts
At the head of each topic, we've added schema information to the title and author details. This will help search engines locate the title of the topic.

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We've also tagged up the posts to help search engines extract relevant information.

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As we can see, Google can read this schema data very easily and quickly locates the data we want it to focus on.

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Forum View
We've added schema data to the forum view also. This will help search engines locate relevant data. The screen shot below shows the data Google extracted from the forum view page.

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As you can see, there is a row for each topic in the forum.

Events
We've added schema data to calendar events and even the sidebar 'Forthcoming Calendar Events' block so they display correctly when your site is searched. Here's the result of Google's rich snippets tool preview. Note the 'Meeting!' event underneath.

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These unobtrusive changes should greatly assist search engines in locating relevant content which is good news for everyone!




Looks good
This is a very nice feature. In combination with the SEO product, this should help search engines (or basically google) get the right "Excerpt" in relation to the topic.
I'm not even American but Hell Yeh !
Add 100 smilies here > <
Good news!!
Looks good. I had the programmer add this for my add in and it works great there too. Good to see it spreading around :)
Wow! I was hoping for this. Awesome news! Thanks.
It sounds like this next round of updates will end up being a more significant change to the way our sites run than the 3.1 -> 3.2 update. Not that it wasn't a big update, but these next set of changes seem to significantly impact how our sites are seeneverywhere else on the web. Better search engine results potentially mean much better traffic patterns and more visitors.
Any chance of author microformat and it's link to g+ profile? It is useful when you have a lot of unique content on forums, and especially on IP.Content, for those of us who want to connect Content entries with G+ profiles for easier professional content verification. like HONcode and stuff.
You really do love us.
yes
it will be very good.
hope to see a better open graph integration which would provide video, pictures included in the page you post a link to..
Some errors are reported by google on http://www.google.co...ls/richsnippets

Errors:
Warning: At least one field must be set for Hcard.
Warning: Missing required field "name (fn)".

Warning: Missing required field "entry-title".
Warning: Missing required field "updated".