Table Schema - A New Type of Structured Markup for Displaying Data in Search Engine (SEO)

What is structured markup ?

Sometimes it is really hard to understand the content of a page for Google crawler. You can help search engine by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page.

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

Popular types of Schema in Search

• Articles: Includes TechArticle, NewsArticle, and ScholarlyArticle.
• Event.
• Products and Offers – includes services.
• Person & author– great to build authorship.
• Organization.
• Local Businesses.
• Reviews.
• Recipes.
• Breadcrumbs – assists user navigation.
• FAQ
• FactCheck – build trust by providing factual and sourced content.
• Datasets.
• Table

Table Schema Markup

In 2018, Google had rollout a new type of schema markup for displaying data tables directly in search results.

What qualify for data tables

• A table or a CSV file with some data
• An organized collection of tables
• A file in a proprietary format that contains data
• A collection of files that together constitute some meaningful dataset
• A structured object with data in some other format that you might want to load into a special tool for processing
• Images capturing data
• Files relating to machine learning, such as trained parameters or neural network structure definitions
• Anything that looks like a dataset to you

Implementation Ways

There are three formats of schema markups are common in the most popular search engines.

• JSON-LD
• Microdata
• RDFa

Example encoded as Microdata embedded in HTML.

<div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Table">
  <h2 itemprop="about">list of presidents</h2>
  <table>
    <tr><th>President</th><th>Party</th></tr>
    <tr>
      <td>George Washington (1789-1797)</td>
      <td>no party</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>John Adams (1797-1801)</td>
      <td>Federalist</td>
    </tr>
    <!-- ... -->
  </table>
</div>  

Find it over here: Table

Debug & Validate Your Code

Structured Data Testing Tool by Google is a popular web app used by SEOs and webmasters to debug and validate Schema.org structured data. You can test and validate your data in this tool.

Google uses Dataset Markup Schema to process and understand the information and relationships in a database.