The Microdata examples on Schema.org seem to indicate adding addition tagging to indicate item properties is the norm. However, can these be added with an existing tag? For instance in the following line of code:
<span itemprop="price" id="product_price" style="white-space: nowrap;">
Would the search engines supporting Schema.org detect this property?
Yes, that is the way they are implemented. You can use them as an attribute to a tag.
I just took the logical div and span tags that already existed in the template and added the needed attributes. Something along the line of:
<div class="product-block" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<img src="http://media.example.com/image/PartImg.jpg" alt="*" title="*" itemprop="image" />
<h2 class="product-name" itemprop="name">Part Name Here</h2>
<p itemprop="manufacturer">Part Mfg.</p>
<meta itemprop="productID" content="sku:PartNo" />
<meta itemprop="url" content="http://www.example.com/part-page.html" />
<div class="product-specs" itemprop="description">
<p>Paragraph of description here</p>
</div>
</div>
The only additions were the meta tags. Where the SKU displays is outside of this block and adding a self referential canonical link would only confuse the customer.
When I run them through Google's rich snippet/microformat/microdata check, it pulls up all the relevent items properly identified. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
