: Is it advantageous for SEO to include structured data on meta-tags On my site's home page, I have various products for which I display an image linking to that item's main product page. For

@Jennifer507

Structured data should only be used on text that is visible to users. The only time mark up should be added that is hidden is if providing both a machine-readable and a human-readable version of your content.

For example, while the text string "Elvis's birthday" is significant to a great many human readers, it's not as meaningful to search engines as 1935-01-08.

However, this doesn't apply in you case, so you should not be adding mark up for data that is not visible; which could most definitely result in being penalised for mark up abuse, as stated by Google:


While rich snippets are generated algorithmically, we do reserve the
right to take manual action (e.g., disable rich snippets for a
specific site) in cases where we see abuse, deception, or other
actions that hurt the search experience for our users. In particular,
you should avoid:
Marking up content that is in no way visible to users.


More info from Google here:

Rich snippets - Products

and here:

Rich snippets guidelines

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@Shanna517

There is no reason to believe that search engines penalize the use of meta/link for Microdata (unless you misuse them, of course, e.g., stuffing keywords not related to your webpage’s content).

(It may very well be the case that search engines don’t like this way very much (compared to marking up visible data), but this doesn’t mean that you’d get penalized, it would just mean that the benefit might be lower/ignored … if it’s the case.)

Microdata meta/link elements can be used in the body exactly because there are cases where the name-value pairs shouldn’t be visible to visitors.

Schema.org (which is a vocabulary initiative created by Bing, Google, and Yahoo!) documents it in their FAQ Missing/implicit information: use the meta tag with content:


Sometimes, a web page has information that would be valuable to mark up, but the information can't be marked up because of the way it appears on the page. The information may be conveyed in an image (for example, an image used to represent a rating of 4 out of 5) or a Flash object (for example, the duration of a video clip), or it may be implied but not stated explicitly on the page (for example, the currency of a price).


(They don’t mention link in that section, but you should always use link (instead of meta) in cases where the value is a URI.)

They also say:


This technique should be used sparingly. Only use meta with content for information that cannot otherwise be marked up.

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