Recently, Google announced that it will begin supporting the Schema.org markup for organization logos. The Schema.org logo item property has existed for some time now, so if you’re already using it, then great! That logo will begin showing up in search result pages associated with your organization.

We can’t be exactly sure how Google will implement these logos in the future, but I’ve found a couple of examples of Google already associating logos with websites and organizations: searching for “Disney World” brings up an infobox from Wikipedia that pulls in a logo from that page. Searching for Universal Studios brings similar results, but the logo on that infobox is not coming from the Wikipedia page, but rather from Universal’s Google + Page, which is pretty nifty.

Although neither of these examples utilize the Schema.org logo property, I expect this markup will make it possible for Google to use automation to glean logos from more organizations without the use of human staff.

One Final Word of Warning…

If you read the article on Google, you’ll notice they mentioned that in order to add the Schema.org logo, it must be used with visible on-page elements. What does that mean? Exactly what the code sample says: <img> tags, not CSS. That means you’d have to use the code like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
  <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.example.com/">Home</a>
  <img itemprop="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" />
</div>

Wait! Don’t run off to go change everything if you’re used to placing logos via a CSS background-image just yet though: there’s another way to do it. You can use the <meta> tag, like this:

<div class="logo logotext" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
 <h1><a itemprop="url" href="http://clarknikdelpowell.com/">Clark Nikdel Powell</a></h1>
 <meta  itemprop="logo" content="/images/logo.png" />
</div>

Testing this in the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool showed that it is successful. So if you’d rather keep displaying logos via CSS, use a handy meta instead of the img tag. And before all you StackOverflow nerds jump all over me, yes, meta tags in the body are allowed.