Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress Now Offer Defragmented Schema Markup

📅 Maio 2, 2019 - Popular WordPress plugin Yoast is releasing an update which offers defragmented implementation of Schema.org markup. Sounds complex? Not worry, we'll define the term for your understanding.

What is Defragmentation?

Here is how Wikipedia puts it: "In the maintenance of file systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the degree of fragmentation. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the mass storage device used to store files into the smallest number of contiguous regions (fragments). It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmentation utilities try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence.

Defragmentation is advantageous and relevant to file systems on electromechanical disk drives. The movement of the hard drive's read/write heads over different areas of the disk when accessing fragmented files is slower, compared to accessing the entire contents of a non-fragmented file sequentially without moving the read/write heads to seek other fragments."

What makes this a first-of-its-kind update is that it cleans up the “fragmented mess” created by most Schema implementations

Even the best Schema implementations are not done very well, the company says, as they often provide no context to search engines.

For example, if a page has eight pieces of Schema markup it’s often unclear to search engines how they’re related to each other.

It’s clean, but those are still eight individual items and search engines need will need to figure out how they’re related to each other.

In addition, it’s also not clear to search engines what the main entity is on the page.

Yoast explains how the latest update to its plugin weaves everything together:
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“In our implementation, which we’re releasing today, all of the pieces “stitch together”: we form them into a nested structure. Without this nesting, a search engine doesn’t know how all these pieces relate to each other, and what the most important piece on a page is. Our implementation also clearly and explicitly defines the “main thing” on that page. This removes all of the guesswork and adds a lot of context for search engines.”

You can see the difference for yourself by running one of Yoast’s example pages through Google’s structured data testing tool.

You can see that the main entity of the page is an article. The article is part of a webpage, which is part of a website.

Scrolling further down you’ll see more entities which Google detects as being related to the article, such as images, author, publisher, and more.
What does this mean for SEOs and site owners?

Implementation of Schema markup with Yoast’s plugin can result in:

Correct info in Google Knowledge Panels.
Full support for Rich Article Pins on Pinterest.
Showing up in a News listing or carousel (when combined with the News SEO plugin).
Higher chance of product snippets in Google Search results (when combined with the WooCommerce SEO plugin).
Higher chance of good local listing snippets (with the Local SEO plugin).

Yoast SEO 11.0 with Schema.org implementation is available now by upgrading the plugin. And these new features are all available in the free version.
What is Schema Markup & Why It’s Important for SEO
What is Schema Markup?

Schema markup, found at Schema.org, is a form of microdata. Once added to a webpage, schema markup creates an enhanced description (commonly known as a rich snippet), which appears in search results.

Top search engines – including Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex – first started collaborating to create Schema.org, back in 2011.

Schema markup is especially important in the age of Hummingbird and RankBrain. How a search engine interprets the context of a query will determine the quality of a search result. Schema can provide context to an otherwise ambiguous webpage.