Re: W3 doesn't validate rich snippets / micro data according to schema.org

2012-12-28 13:16, Katrin Schumacher wrote:

> after integrating rich snippets into my Website, I do have numerous
> W3-errors on these pages

That's because the pages declares an XHTML 1.0 doctype and it does not 
allow things like the itemscope and itemprop attributes. You could use 
an HTML5 doctype instead, but then you have problems with some other 
constructs, like some meta tags (HTML5 has a very limited set of meta 
tags it accepts).

There's not much you can do about this. I once tried setting up an HTML5 
DTD so that people could check the formal syntax of pages (as opposite 
to having to deal with the rather subjective restrictions imposed by the 
HTML5 mode of the validator), but the W3C Validator cannot really cope 
with it, due to technical limitations.

> I have concerns that these errors provide disadvantages in SEO.

They aren't. SEO has nothing to do with such formal syntax definitions 
that disallow some new attributes. The question is rather whether search 
engines pay any real attention to "rich snippets". It seems that for 
now, they use them only when encountered on some very large commercial 
or community sites.

You can use tools like
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
to see what Google says to think about your rich snippets. It may inform 
you of some technical issues with the markup. But if everything seems to 
be technically OK, this still doesn't mean that the snippets have some 
effect.

Yucca

Received on Saturday, 29 December 2012 14:11:30 UTC