How Search Engines Actually Identify and Categorize Web Content

Along with the introduction of search engines to the Internet came the need for a structured vocabulary that would allow those search engines to appropriately identify and categorize the contents of web pages, thus allowing them to be sorted for relevance (along with other criteria) each time users input a new search engine query. Today, search engines like Google and Yahoo use structured data, as interpreted through the lens of schemas, to accomplish this task. But what, exactly, is the relationship between schemas and structured data? Structured data is just data that has been organized in such a way that its individual elements are addressable and can be more efficiently processed and analyzed. A data structure refers to the repository that organizes information in this way. Structured data can be contrasted with unstructured and semi-structured data, all three of which exist along the same continuum, under varying types and intensities of organization. When it comes to data structure, the rule holds that the more intense data’s organization is, the more amenable it becomes to processing, making structured data far more useful in terms of processing by search engines than its more loosely organized counterparts. A webmaster can provide search engines like Google and Yahoo with explicit information about the nature and purpose of a webpage by using structured data, thus boosting their chances of inclusion among the higher, more relevant ranks of search results. Schemas are what enable webmasters to embed structured data in their web pages, for use by search engines. They are, in short, the grammar to structured data’s vocabulary. Those mentioning schemas in an SEO context are often referring specifically to Schema.org, which was founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, as a way to develop structured data vocabularies through an open community process. To this day, the mission of this collaborative project remains “to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond,” and more than 10 million sites currently use markup from Schema.org to organize their online content. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/aq7o57/whatisthedifferencebetweenstructureddata/.