Co-citations Using Schema.org and Microdata

Confucius say: Link without linking

As I've mentioned before you can link to content without linking.  This means that you can tell Google that the citation your making is relevant to a particular website and Google, seeing the URL of the relevant page, will know that it's a URL and will look at it as being relevant to the topic of the citation.

Google doesn't need an <a> tag to determine a link.  Well using Schema.org's Microdata Markup you can let Google (and Yahoo, Bing and Yandex) know that it's a link without having to include the <a> tag.

From Schema.org's Introduction page:

"Links to 3rd party sites can help search engines to better understand the item you are describing on your web page".

This is the basis behind citations and Google's PageRank Citation Rank in the first place.  The link is not just a "vote" cast in the favor of the relevance of the site which is being linked to it also specifically tells the engines (and you) that the content of the destination page is specific to the topic wherein the link is anchored.

Again from Schema.org:

"However, you might not want to add a visible link on your page. In this case, you can use a link element instead, as follows:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
  <span itemprop="name">The Catcher in the Rye</span>—
  <link itemprop="url" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye" />
  by <span itemprop="author">J.D. Salinger</span>
</div>"

This allows you to link to create a link to the page that the engines can see that doesn't require an <a> tag or physical link.

If you haven't gotten into Schema.org Microdata markup then you should definitely get going.  It's one part of the future of SEO.

You will be using this to optimize sites from event sites to business client sites to ecommerce and brick and mortar sites.

It offers SEOs a lot of opportunity to target the relevance of the content of websites.

SEO Prediction:

My prediction is this... using the Schema.org markup will lead websites to super fine-tune content in such a profoundly focused way that you will have sites that are so narrowly targeting each page that it will cause a massive growth in overall site page counts,highly stress categorization, and greatly decrease content on each page.  You'll have an increased targeting of relevance to any additional content you have on detail pages that is not of primary importance (i.e. it's not about the product or topic that the page exists for) but is about additional, similar or related content.  Citations and backlinks to these deep pages will have to be extremely targeted in relevance (speaking of course more for SEO's doing the citations and linkbuilding).

The web will become more clear and focused which will allow much easier search and retrieval of information...but then again..that's the point, right?