Bing Microformats & Markup Validator – A Complete Guide

For enhanced search display results usage of microformats appropriately is very essential. Bing offers many tools for its users which not only enhances your experience for structured data content but also provides visually appealing and information rich results. Bing supports all of the following specifications:

  1. HTML Microdata
  2. org
  3. Open Graph
  4. JSON-LD
  5. RDFa
  6. Microformats

HTML attributes which encode metadata in web pages also referred as structured markup are the most widely used structured data for visibility over search engines. This markup separates the presentation layer from the data layer thus giving more information to search engines about the content of the webpage. All of these markup formats are enough to produce rich snippets for various types like online product offerings, events and reviews.

No preference to any particular specification is given by Bing’s crawlers hence depending upon your suitability its entirely dependent on you what you choose. All you need is basic understanding of web markup and you are ready to go. Annotating any data doesn’t change its visible content but gives vital information to Bing like what type of content your hosting. With Bing these annotations are used in giving your content more visual make over but it also supplements and validates data sources.

Does Bing Support Json-Id

Microformats a structured markup for specific areas such as people or recipes is one chiefly supported ones among others. With the ongoing murmurs that sites without microformats will be left in the SERP display its importance has gained popularity. As stated above apart from Bing, Google has also introduced various new tools in the Webmaster repertoire which help in monitoring and troubleshooting any issues with the microfromats.

Annotations don’t guarantee that Bing will use the annotated content and generate visually rich snippet but it also takes care of the surroundings of the annotated content. Once implemented, Bing crawlers will pick up on these the next time you visit your page. Sometimes even after this it is difficult to get the desired visually rich search result which may be because of:

  • Schema and data validation failure: careful evaluation of annotations before publishing them is very important. A Bing crawler validates annotated data against the schema format and also against the specified data types. Do provide enough data for all scenario provided.
  • Global availability: visually rich snippets are not available in everywhere whereas annotations are processed and validated almost in every market.

A microformat supports various scenarios such as events, people, products and offers, reviews, claimreview, business and organisation and even recipes.

Bing Json-ld

It’s very essential that you use a testing tool instead of relying on your judgement of behaviour of any microformat. I will take you through a few steps that not only ensure proper tagging of your data but also enable you to take the most out of the search display in Google or Bing.

  1. Analyse content and tag data respectively

With microformats that are supplied by Schema.org you have many schemas on one page. Do follow all the schema guidelines to the tee and link every part of the breadcrumb including its last part to the page.

  1. Review the extracted data

Ensure if all the data is in the right place or not and it does not contain any type of errors.

  1. Webmaster Tool

Do ensure your microformats are visible to Google and track your real progress.

  1. Monitor the structured data report

Go live do monitor structured data report and the actual search display in both Bing and Google.

  1. Use Bing Microformat Validator

Immediately after going live do use the new Bing Microformat Validator which accepts only URLs and not code. If you encounter any error, please use Bingbot and retest.

Bing Markup Validator – How It Works?

Markup Validator: by providing a URL this tool will report on any structured markup found on the page and by using these structured markups you can display rich snippets for your URLs. Its purpose is to help you understand whether you have implemented your selected structured markup language in such a way that enables Bing to read the information more accurately. It can be used on any URL to view the special markup applied in the page’s source code.

Providing structured data gives a better idea to search engines of the resource. With data where disambiguation is an issue using structured data helps in blurring the confusion. By using these tools your webpage can outperform other regular web pages immensely.

Do spend time with microformats and apply them correctly as in the long run these will be very beneficial in your enhancing user experience in search engine rankings and traffic thus do keep in mind that these determine the topicality of your content and your site but do not guarantee high rankings.