Strict microdata—Catalogs

“Strict microdata” is Yandex’s term for markup that takes priority over other data sources when the robot crawls the page. For product lists, that means the OfferCatalog schema with nested Offer objects.

Why priority matters

Yandex assembles product information from several sources — the page, Yandex Market, submitted feeds. Strict microdata is how you make the page authoritative. For a merchant whose Market feed has drifted out of date, or whose product data is being taken from an aggregator, this is the mechanism that puts the site back in control of what is shown under its own name.

OfferCatalog properties — all required

• name — catalogue name.
• description — catalogue description.
• image — a general image, given as a URL, not an ImageObject.

Offer properties — all required

• url — the product page.
• name, description, image (again a plain URL).
• availability — whether it can be ordered.
• price.

Every supported field is required. This is stricter than ordinary product markup, where most properties are optional — and that is the trade: complete data in exchange for priority.

The structural rule

One product list per page, marked with OfferCatalog, with no nested lists. A category page presenting several groups of products must choose one grouping or restructure the page.

Implementation note

Because every field is required and images must be plain URLs rather than objects, this is markup to generate from the product database rather than to hand-write. A single null description on one item invalidates that entry — which argues for generating it from the same query that renders the visible listing, so the two cannot drift apart and a missing value breaks something a person can see.