Does Bing prefer one structured data format over another?

Definition: Bing says its crawlers do not prefer one supported structured data specification over another. It lists Schema.org with HTML Microdata and JSON-LD, alongside Microformats, RDFa and Open Graph, while its scenario table shows that support differs by use case.

Key facts

• Bing leaves the choice among its supported specifications to the publisher, according to its structured data documentation.
• Schema.org describes its vocabulary as usable with Microdata, RDFa or JSON-LD in its getting started guide.
• RDFa adds markup attributes that provide machine-readable hints to HTML, as described in the W3C RDFa 1.1 Primer.
• The Microformats Wiki describes microformats as HTML for marking up people, organizations, events, locations, blog posts, products, reviews, resumes and recipes.
• The Open Graph protocol uses page metadata to turn a web page into a rich object in a social graph.

What does Bing's no-preference statement mean?

Bing's structured data documentation says, "Our crawlers do not prefer one specification over another." It then leaves the choice to the publisher and says a basic understanding of web markup is generally sufficient to implement annotations. The statement describes crawler preference at the specification level. It does not say that each specification has identical coverage for every scenario.

Schema.org is a vocabulary of shared terms. Its getting started guide says that the vocabulary is used with Microdata, RDFa or JSON-LD formats. Bing's page lists those Schema.org formats, then lists Microformats, RDFa and Open Graph as supported specifications. This makes format and vocabulary separate decisions: Schema.org supplies terms, while a markup format expresses them in a page.

Does support vary by scenario?

Yes. Bing's support table has columns for Microdata, Microformats and RDFa. It gives each scenario its own row, including Breadcrumbs, Products and offers, and Recipes. For Products and offers, it names hProduct under Microformats and provides a separate RDFa support column. Recipes are marked supported in all three columns, with hRecipe named for Microformats. The table therefore documents a practical difference between the general no-preference statement and coverage for a particular content type.

The same documentation says that Bing validates annotated data against the schema and data types specified by the chosen format. It gives a date used as a price and an event without a date as examples of annotations that can be ignored. A format choice still needs to match the scenario and the data supplied.

How do the listed formats work?

RDFa is an attribute-based method inside HTML. The W3C RDFa 1.1 Primer describes it as a technique that augments visual information on the Web with machine-readable hints and shows how to mark up existing human-readable page content. The Microformats community describes microformats as HTML patterns for common content such as people, organizations and events, and says sites use them to publish a standard API consumed by search engines, browsers and other websites.

Open Graph is page-level metadata. The Open Graph protocol documentation says its initial version is based on RDFa and places additional meta tags in the page head. Bing's documentation treats Open Graph separately from Schema.org annotations and gives this example for an image used by Bing News:

<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.myhost.com/examplenews/example.jpg">

Bing says that an Open Graph image property may be used for the image size specified in the Open Graph image meta tag in Bing News results on PC and mobile. That is a documented use for one property, rather than a general preference for Open Graph over the other supported specifications.

Related terms

• Structured data
• JSON-LD
• Microdata
• RDFa

FAQ

Does Bing prefer JSON-LD?

No. Bing lists JSON-LD under Schema.org formats and says its crawlers do not prefer one supported specification over another. Its scenario table still records where particular formats are supported.

Does Bing document the same support for every scenario?

No. Bing's structured data documentation uses separate rows and columns for scenarios and formats. Its Products and offers row names hProduct under Microformats and includes an RDFa support column, so the documentation calls for checking the relevant scenario.

Is Open Graph the same as Schema.org markup?

Bing documents them as separate annotation types. Schema.org provides shared vocabulary terms used with formats such as Microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD, while Open Graph provides page-level metadata properties.

Sources

1. Bing Webmaster Tools, "Marking up your site: Overview", n.d.
2. Schema.org, "Getting started with schema.org using Microdata", n.d.
3. W3C, "RDFa 1.1 Primer: Rich Structured Data Markup for Web Documents", 17 March 2015
4. Microformats Wiki, "Main Page", n.d.
5. Open Graph protocol, "The Open Graph protocol", n.d.

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