As reported by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable:
Google has quietly added a line to the rich snippets - organizational help document saying they now support "any of its sub-types."
For search geeks, this is exciting news. We've been eagerly anticipating additional schema support for some time:
Here are two links attorneys should follow to learn more about implementing attorney schema:
Rich snippets - Organizations Google Webmaster Tools Help
As we move from a web of strings to a web of things, it stands to reason that structured data mark up will play a more significant role in how machines like search engines deliver results.
In other words, don't be surprised to see structured data signals used in ranking pages!
So, I advise you to mark up your pages.
Also, be sure to include as many properties as you can.
Especially properties related to:
And now for a secret sauce tip:
Include the "sameAs" property.:
URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity. E.g. the URL of the item's Wikipedia page, Freebase page, or official website.
Okay, perhaps secret sauce is a bit of a stretch, but hear me out.
Your pages' associations with trusted data sources (like Wikipedia and Freebase) will become strong signals to semantic search.
Furthermore, I believe it is extremely probable that properties and associations relevant to understanding an attorney's knowledge, skill and experience will become the building blocks of the semantic web in the context of attorney searches.
For example, properties like:
May all be considered relevant in determining which attorney pages and sites to serve up in results.
And this is likely to be just the beginning. Don't be surprised to see the addition of properties like:
This will allow search engines to move several steps closer to distinguishing credentialed lawyers in their results.
Once you've added schema markup to your pages, remember to head over to Google's Structured Data Testing Tool to be sure that you're markup is validating.
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