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We enabled RDF everywhere on a corporate multistore setup using a popular ecom platform aprx 1 month ago. All is well, RDF tests check out, we auth'd each domain->location->publisher, SNI->SSL->Everywhere + Qualys check out, everything is locked and loaded. 0 Errors for 3+ weeks since we enabled RDF, yet something is wrong. Do we have the CrazyGoogleRDF cousin or is this just the nature of running a multisite in RDF era?

It seems our stats are jumping all over the place.

In webmaster tools for example, its like a rollercoaster. Sites are bursting indexes of RDF entities up and they are losing them down in polar opposites areas. Its jumping around site to site with its priorities instead of indexing all consistently. There seems to be a very basic SERP correlation to this.

It refuses to find more reviews or backwards compatible reviews aggregate since 2 weeks ago. I know it works, ive seen it in ~12 entities in this batch, and hundreds in the past. It just refuses to understand them even on pages it has gotten to. Could this be because of "shared reviews" between multistore? Its like it just gave up and never came back to crawl more.

It has indexed some parts right, mixed between schema.org and backwards data-vocabulary. Example breadrumbs, prices, stock....so it knows they are an entity enough. But it gets a bit weird here, its going crazy with SERPs. One week a site will be king, the next another from our deck replaces it. One week stars, another none. One this, another that. Its like it has ADD....

evidence link removed

This seems to be related to Googles timing with expirimentations. See my answer below. If anyone has more/better, feel free to answer again :)

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  • You seem to use Microdata, not RDF(a).
    – unor
    Commented Sep 16, 2014 at 9:59
  • I agree we use microdata, but more generally its still RDF (just not the RDF spec). Technically RDF stands for "Resource Description Framework" which encompasses all metas. Also "The essence of RDFa is to provide a set of attributes that can be used to carry metadata in an XML language (hence the 'a' in RDFa)." Now if we look at Microdata, its described as an "HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages." which sounds an awful lot like RDFa to me :) Different tags, same beast.
    – dhaupin
    Commented Sep 16, 2014 at 15:26
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    Well, Microdata and RDFa are used for similar things, but Microdata is not an RDF serialization (otherwise there would be no need to come up with a Microdata to RDF transformation). "RDF" is defined by W3C specifications, it’s not a general category name that can be used for "anything semantic". See also my related answer about Microdata vs RFDa.
    – unor
    Commented Sep 17, 2014 at 7:35
  • @unor Musta missed this alert to a comment. Good call, I agree with your thoughts on all of that and will change my orientation on the acronym. Dirty secret: I still call it RDF "Rich Data Formatting" for green clients to get their feet wet. Explain later the dialects, og, twcards, etc. They get overwhelmed by all the spec-niches in it otherwise hah.
    – dhaupin
    Commented Oct 24, 2014 at 22:01

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Answer to my own question if anyone is curious:

Googlebot did indeed index all of the RDF style markup, it just took longer than normal and it acted totally ADD. This may be because of some overall duplicate code similarities, or maybe their recent semantic widget experimentations. Reviews, prices, authorship, location, and modified all seemed to be tweaky when dealing with new content over the last 6 months. It still hasn't "activated" all the data, but its confirmed crawled, checked, and ready to roll in webmaster tools (finally). GWT wouldnt even report indexes of multi's before. If the shared reviews work+stick later on after the tweaking, I will note it in this thread.

Note: the non-recently-experimented-with as well as legacy style markup rendered widgets fine the whole time. It was like 3 week activation for popular pages, which is normal.

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