About schema.org

Google and other major search engines support the schema.org vocabulary for structured data. This vocabulary defines a standard set of type names and property names, for example, http://schema.org/MusicEvent indicates a concert performance, with startDate and and location properties to specify the concert's key details.

Data in the schema.org vocabulary may be embedded in an HTML page using any of three alternative formats: microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD.

  • Microdata and RDFa define new HTML attributes that let you indicate what schema.org field names correspond with what user-visible text on the page.

  • JSON-LD is the newest and simplest markup format: it lets you embed a block of JSON data inside a script tag anywhere in the HTML. Since the data does not have to be interleaved with the user-visible text, it's much easier to express nested data items (say, the Country of a PostalAddress of a MusicVenue of an Event). Also, Google can read JSON-LD data even when it is dynamically injected into the page's contents, such as by Javascript code or embedded "widgets".

    Google is in the process of adding JSON-LD support to more markup-powered features. So far, JSON-LD is supported for all Knowledge Graph features, sitelink search boxes, Event Rich Snippets, and Recipe Rich Snippets; Google recommends the use of JSON-LD for those features. For the remaining Rich Snippets types and breadcrumbs, Google recommends the use of microdata or RDFa.

For help authoring well-formatted markup, try Google's Structured Data Markup Helper. Most importantly, whichever format you choose, test your markup's correctness before deploying it!