Search giants Google, Bing and Yahoo announced Wednesday a new joint initiative schema.org to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data on web pages. The new site will be a valuable resource for site owners and developers looking to learn more about structured data and improve how their sites appear in major search engines. Schema.org will assist webmasters who are looking to add markup to their pages.

For years search engines have been working separately to support structured markup. Google introduced rich snippets to its search in 2009 to help people find better summaries of reviews and people, and since that time expanded to new kinds of rich snippets.

Schema.org will include all existing types of rich snippets together with schemas for 100 new categories including movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places that webmaster can use to markup their pages and improve the way they appear in search results. Search engines use this markup to improve the display of search results.

“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,” schema.org explains.

“We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful. We know that it takes time and effort for webmasters to add this markup to their pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way. That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for sitemaps in 2006”, Google’s Ramanathan Guha wrote in a blog post.

Bing said that it already accepts a wide range of markup formats for features such as Tiles and will keep on doing so, and added that by standardizing on schema.org in partnership with Google and Yahoo! it is looking to make the markup choices more simple for webmasters.

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