Microdata

Microdata is a specific, somewhat legacy HTML specification used to nest structured data (Schema Markup) directly within the existing HTML tags of a webpage. Before Google universally adopted and recommended JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) as the absolute standard for structured data, SEOs manually injected microdata attributes (like `itemprop=”name”`) into individual HTML elements to help search engines extract specific entities (like a product price or review rating). Today, microdata is considered highly inefficient, prone to catastrophic coding errors, and incredibly difficult to scale across an enterprise domain compared to the clean, centralized JSON-LD format.

Microdata Simplified

Microdata is an old, messy way of adding hidden code to your website to help Google understand exactly what your page is about. Because it required you to manually edit the actual text of your article, almost everyone now uses a cleaner, easier system called JSON-LD instead.