Google, Yahoo and Bing have teamed up recently to develop Schema.org – a project aimed at creating and supporting a common set of schemas for structured data markup. To quote Google “Schema.org aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages to help search engines better understand their websites“.
Since Apple doesn’t support Flash, a large section of websites use html technology to run interactive web pages. The structured data, when converted to html, loses the tags -a problem which has been tackled so far by engines with rich snippets. In the new scheme of things, the webmasters can assign mark-ups from the universal common source directory of Schema.org which is a far more efficient way for SEO.
All the existing types of rich snippets, along with more than 100 new categories have been already added, according to a Google statement. They made it clear that the search engines will keep supporting the rich snippet technology, but has advised web masters to switch to the new program sooner or later.
You can read the full Google Blog post regarding the launch of Schema.org here.