Microdata is one of the best new features announced in Joomla! 3.3. Rich snippets like microdata (also called RDFa or microformats) provide additional information for search engines to help them better understand your content. In short, with microdata you will say to Google or any other search engine :
Hey, here is my article! You can find information about the author, publish date etc…right here.
This microdata syntax can describe a specific type of information like an article or person, but it can also describe a movie, event, product or place. List of available schemas you can check out at the schemas.org website and also learn more about how to mark-up your content.
How to enable microdata in Joomla! 3.3?
You don’t have to do anything to use microdata with Joomla! 3.3 because the improved article or contact view with the additional microdata is available by default. There is also no option to disable it, so all user of the latest Joomla! get SEO-optimized content without the need to make any changes in their configuration or article details, whether they like it or not (but you should like it, really!).
Microdata details are not visible at first look because these additional HTML5 tags don’t change anything for your run-of-the-mill, average, regular website visitor. Let’s look at some sample code from Google Webmaster Tools for help. This is the default way to display an author information block without using the schemas syntax:
My name is Bob Smith but people call me Smithy. Here is my home page: www.example.com I live in Albuquerque, NM and work as an engineer at ACME Corp.
as you can see there is a simple div container and plain text with a link inside. Search engines will interpet this part of code as default text; search engine don’t know whether it is related to a person or article, nor can it tell what type of content it’s describing. Now let’s look at exactly the same text, this time with additional microdata:
My name is Bob Smith but people call me Smithy. Here is my home page: www.example.com I live in Albuquerque, NM and work as an engineer at ACME Corp.
It is not hard to see that the code is a little bit longer than before, but it contains additional schemas information. First of all the div container has an itemscope definition which describes what type of vocabulary we will use; in other words, what type of content you want to describe — in this example it is Person. Every single itemprop describes a particular property that could be specific to a person or author, like a url, nickname, name, title etc… Thanks to this additional code, Google and other browser engines can understand this HTML code and know that this describes a person.
I have Joomla! 3.3; how do I check my microdata details?
When it comes to Joomla! implementation you can’t see these changes until you check your website’s source code. One of the most common uses of microdata is to describe article and author. In Joomla the default article view uses microdata, but it is also used on contact page. In previous Joomla! versions the default article content code looked similar to this one:
Nullam id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit.
Since Joomla! 3.3 this code is extended with additional details:
Nullam id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit.
which clearly tells a search engine “Here’s the start of my article; stick around if you’re looking for high quality content ☺”
Microdata syntax allows you to include hierarchical data, so defining the article is not the only change; previously the code, in regards to the author details, would just display the author’s name:
and now you should see something similar to this:
These two schemas are the main change in regards to the single article view, but of course they can contain more itemprop definitions like datePublished, genre, dateModified or interactionCount.
There is much easier way to check your document data structure by using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. Just paste a link to your website in this tool and you’ll get all microdata-related information along with syntax validation.