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I'm currently using this: 

<a href="http://twitter.com/username" rel="me">Twitter</a>

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/userfacebookpage" rel="me">Facebook</a>

<a href="http://www.pinterest.com/username/" rel="me">Pinterest</a>

<a href="https://www.google.com/websiteprofile" rel="me">Google+</a>

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/userchannel" rel="me">Youtube</a>

I see in this answer that:

rel=”me” Defines The Person

While the rel=”author” attribute is new markup, rel=”me” is not. In fact, for a number of years now Google has encouraged its use. It should be used in links that point from a social networking profile back to your website and vice-versa. This tells Google that the same name and bio information on separate websites is actually the same person.

and Google Developer's Specify your social profiles to Google help doc says this:

Use markup on your official website to add your social profile information to the Google Knowledge panel in some searches. Knowledge panels can prominently display your social profile information. [...]

Note: As long as you use the same schema.org types as the example, you can also use microdata or RDFa markup formats instead of JSON-LD. For example, in microdata, visible links can be marked up by in a structured data SPAN, like this:

<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">   
    <link itemprop="url" href="http://www.your-company-site.com">
    <a itemprop="sameAs" href="http://www.facebook.com/your-company">FB</a>  
    <a itemprop="sameAs" href="http://www.twitter.com/YourCompany">Twitter</a>
</span>

Do I need the rel="me" and the itemprop="sameAs" or will one do the 'job' of both?

Google doesn't support itemprop="sameAs" for Pinterest and Twitter already uses rel="me" in your website field.

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2
  • 1
    The main reason rel="me" came around was to inform Google to associate A with B, i.e you with you! nowadays, Google and other search engines have come along way and are pretty good at pairing content even without the use of those tags. For example, Google pairs Google Plus with your main website using the a rel="publisher" or rel="author" from there you can associate your plus page with all your other social networks, this along informs Google what is what. So in my opinion is that rel="me" is purely optional, but hopefully someone else can give more insight.
    – Simon Hayter
    Feb 8, 2015 at 21:18
  • What about the sameAs? Should I put that somewhere or will having my social networks linked in my plus page take care of the google knowledge panel?
    – Jason Chisel
    Feb 8, 2015 at 21:55

1 Answer 1

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5

Why not have both?

Under an organisation Item in Schema.org:

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. [sameAs, URL, Organization]

An example HTML snippet can be seen below:

<div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
    <meta itemprop="url" content="http://example.com">
    <a href="http://twitter.com/username" rel="me" itemprop="sameAs">Twitter</a>
    <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/userfacebookpage" rel="me" itemprop="sameAs">Facebook</a>
    <a href="http://www.pinterest.com/username/" rel="me" itemprop="sameAs">Pinterest</a>
    <a href="https://www.google.com/websiteprofile" rel="me" itemprop="sameAs">Google+</a>
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/userchannel" rel="me" itemprop="sameAs">Youtube</a>
</div>

Be careful to understand scope with Microdata. The sameAs under the Organization Item Type directly refers to a corporate identity.

If you were to include itemprop="sameAs" without declaring an Organization in scope, then the default scope would be for http://schema.org/WebPage.

The sameAs value for WebPage refers to pages that are similar to that exact page and would only be used in a "About Us" or "Our Organization" type of page - a blog post, product page etc would be inappropriate for this.

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3
  • Having them both as in your example would say "this social network is associated with this webpage?"
    – Jason Chisel
    Feb 9, 2015 at 7:30
  • 3
    No, because it's nested with an Organization schema itemtype. This is a really important point, and it's easy to get confused if you think only within the scope of a company website. Imagine if you had a directory section page that listed multiple organizations and each listing had social media links in the view. By identifying the scope, you eliminate the guesswork from social media tags in your footer for example for search engines. You could even chuck in a <meta itemprop="url" content="example.com" /> for good measure, but these should be used sparingly.
    – inkovic
    Feb 9, 2015 at 10:59
  • Sorry, I meant with the website not a specific webpage. Will using your example take care of telling crawlers that the social profiles linked are directly associated with the website and take care of the google knowledge panel social network accounts? I appreciate your patience as there's alot more to schema then I thought.
    – Jason Chisel
    Feb 9, 2015 at 13:13

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