Do Schema.org changes impact local SEO

[DotCar]

I've reviewed the various presentation and blog posts from SMX advanced regarding local SEO and I didn't see any mention of Schema.org and microformats.  Has any research or case studies been presented supporting that implementation of Schema.org microformats will improve local results?

Here is one example where I've implemented the basics in the address info of the footer.

http://bit.ly/lZQYeg

Any tips on how to further optimize with schema.org markup?

[oznappies]

You would figure that if Google, Bing & Yahoo get behind a new standard for declaring what snippets of information mean through schema.org then at some stage soon, they will either be using those tags to hone in on specific parts of content more relevant to a search query or present more information to the viewer during a search.

The new section, article and heading tags of HTML5 would also seem to come in to the new richer data model for a web page. There has been a lot of work standardising these tags, so it would be a logical deduction to consider they along with personalization factors will become more prevalent in future.

[BedeFahey]

The Google FAQs about places and rich snippets (which you're going to generate by adding schema.org markup) says that they will not negatively or positively impact rankings. But...

I'm going to suggest that it almost certainly seems like they will, -if- you can get Google to pick them up from your site and add them to your places listing.

Obviously, the number of reviews that Google can pull from other local-portal sites is a ranking factor. In May, Mike Blumenthal wrote a blog post which identified places listings where he had seen Google including hreview testimonials pulled directly from the business's own website.

I'm skeptical that Google is going to treat these reviews differently from reviews from other sources, and somehow exclude them from their ranking algo for places. If Google didn't believe that the reviews are valid, then they wouldn't include them in the first place, because it would make for a really poor user experience. If they're not excluding them for user experience reasons, I doubt they'll exclude them from being a ranking factor.  Which means, to me, that (if you can get the picked up) they'll have a positive impact on rank.