Product microdata from Schema.org
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An article (http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2011/11/18/step-up-your-e-commerce-seo-game-with-product-microdata.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter) is claiming that using this product micro data (http://schema.org/Product) might help product pages rank better.
Do you have any experience using these tags and would it be worth the time to implement these on a site with 1000's of products? Would it make sense to selectively implement them on specific products that actually have a good chance of ranking high instead?
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I have not placed the code on my site yet but Google seems to be figuring some formats out without the code as I see bulleted lists, dimensions and prices displayed for some of my pages. Even if this data does not improve rankings it might improve your clickthrough rate - especially if you have a kickass price or provocative product bullets displayed.
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I am not sure what advanatge microsodat give you at this time, but if i were a search engine, and someone searched for "buy nike shoes", I would much rather return a complet nike shoe object, complete with price image, description and ther rest, rather then just a reference to nike shoes in a web page somewhere.
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We implemented the Schema.org microdata format a few months ago and have seen no strong correlation which suggests using these tags would increase your rankings in the search results. I speculate it's not so much a ranking factor but more of a signal that tells search engines, "Hey, this is the exact price of our product named XYZ potion."
To answer your question though, the tags are "nice-to-have" but not necessarily a "must-have" and implementation is completely contingent on how your business prioritizes your SEO projects. For example, if you have other issues to take care of such as 404 detection & handling, content generation, link acquisition, etc. I would put those at the front of the queue (I think Vanessa Fox would agree).
Afterthought: Search engines are very smart nowadays and long before Schema.org was announced, our competitors had pricing rich snippets in the search results even though they didn't use the tags.
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