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I'm practicing application of microdata via http://schema.org. Anyone who's browsed the documentation there knows that there's a lot of need for improvement for more clear understandings on use for each property. My question on this post is more about the "significantLinks" property and how it effects SEO for on page, in content anchored text. Does anyone have any more information regarding whether its good to use for link optimization? I understand what schema.org means that it's to be used on "non-navigational links" and those links should be relevant to the current page's meaning. But will using this property hurt SEO or make SEO better for each page?

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2 Answers

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There are two properties:

  • significantLink - URL - One of the more significant URLs on the page. Typically, these are the non-navigation links that are clicked on the most.

  • significantLinks - URL - The most significant URLs on the page. Typically, these are the non-navigation links that are clicked on the most (legacy spelling; see singular form, significantLink).

Source: Schema.org webpage documentation

I agree that it doesn't explain what search engines will do with that data, but that's the point. Schema.org does not specify how things will look in search results: they only specify what something means, and leave it up to search engines to implement ways to display that data in a meaningful way.

Does google do anything with this, though? No, google has not completely implemented schema.org in their search results, and they don't have to. Here's the list of google supported schema.org specifications:

Google supports rich snippets for these content types:

  • Reviews
  • People
  • Products
  • Businesses and organizations
  • Recipes
  • Events
  • Music

Google also recognizes markup for video content and uses it to improve our search results.

Source: Google webmaster support's page on rich snippets (microdata, microformats, and RDFa)

I don't see anything there about significantLink or significantLinks, so I'm going to conclude that google does nothing with it.

However, I don't think that google is going to implement this. This feature could easily be abused by people wanting certain pages to rank higher than others, even if they aren't relevant to the search query. If Google implemented this, it would destroy their user's search experience, and that's something I can't see google doing.

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up vote 3 down vote

As of right now, schema.org microformats are primarily used to display purposes in search results. So far there has not been any indication that they affect search results in any significant way. Plus with that particular format being easy to abuse i would suspect it would have no effect on rankings. I would speculate it will serve other purposes somehow related to the display of search results.

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I understand that Rich Snippets require usage of microdata, and Rich Snippets are for search result display. However, last year, the major search engines all agreed on microdata to help with the accuracy of search queries. From my understanding it is entirely beneficial to define each page of a website with the type of business it is. As far as "significantLinks" I'm looking for more information for the use of this property. Schema.org is very limited on descriptions. – hdavis84 Jul 1 '12 at 18:29

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