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We are about to launch a website where users can search for rental apartments. To please the Google search engine I want to mark all of my apartment related HTML elements with some semantic markup.

I have been looking at Schema.org and FOAF to find some good vocabs to use. But I can't seem to find vocabs that support apartment informations.

Example:

2 bedroom
300 square feet
Parkingspot

And so on. Right now I use typeof="ApartmentComplex" - but I want to markup the above.

Can anyone give me a hint on how I would mark up such information in a way that enables Google to display them as Rich Snippets and increase pageranking?

unor
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Karsten Tietje
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  • Looking for a Google Richsnippet for appartment? Sorry but currently, Google generates Rich Snippets only for: `Reviews`, `People`, `Products`, `Businesses and organizations`, `Recipes`, `Events`, `Music` (see https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en) – Ciseur Aug 07 '14 at 13:09
  • In case you missed it, Schema.org now has more specific types/properties for your case (I updated my answer). – unor Oct 29 '16 at 18:48

1 Answers1

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Schema.org’s ApartmentComplex doesn’t seem to be appropriate if you want to markup a single apartment. So the parent type Residence should be used instead. However, these Place types don’t have properties for marking up the things you are looking for.

Product/Offer could also be used, but they also don’t have apartment-specific properties, of course (see my answer about using Offer for renting apartments).

So, as you seem to be interested only in Google and their Rich Snippets (and apart from some Microformats and deprecated data-vocabulary.org support, you’d have to use Schema.org), the answer is: Currently not possible.

Update 2016

In the last Schema.org version, v3.1, types and properties for "hotels and other forms of accommodations" were introduced.

Now you can use the Apartment type, and provide your data with the numberOfRooms, floorSize, and amenityFeature properties.

But Google Search still doesn’t seem to offer any related search result features.

Community
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unor
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  • Thanks for the great answer! I am not surprised of course. You are the markup guru! I am looking around for updated and fairly complete examples of marking up 1) an apartment for rent, 2) Apartment Complex, and possibly anything else that applies. I am starting here, however, if you know of some examples I can use as a template, that would be fantastic! Especially for apartment details. Cheers!! – closetnoc Oct 29 '16 at 17:08
  • @closetnoc: Thanks for your comment; I made short update to my answer, as things have evolved in the meantime :) -- The current Schema.org version got a big update with types/properties relevant for various forms of accommodation. They have a documentation page that introduces/explains them: [Markup for Hotels](http://schema.org/docs/hotels.html) (it’s not for hotels only). -- I don’t know any other resources, as I’ve not yet worked in this domain. – unor Oct 29 '16 at 18:45
  • Thanks for the update! I did find some Json sample code that I quickly modified. It may not be complete, but it is a start. It is a shame that G does not recognize it yet. Still, it is something. I am using openElements to bang up a quick sample web site. Makes for messy code since everything is in a ugly div tag. Will make it mobile, deploy it to a dev web server, then clean it up later. Sucks. But it is making a sharp looking site none-the-less which is more than I can do. I suck at pretty. Good with code, but lack the imagination to be a web designer. We all have out limits. ;-) Cheers!! – closetnoc Oct 30 '16 at 01:53