Correct usage of Brand from schema.org

Question

What is the correct usage of using the Brand schema from schema.org?

I have a website that sells clothes. I have a brands page where I list all the brands for which I have products on my website, for example like Levi, Calvin Klein, etc. If you click on any of these names I take you to the brand details page (on my website) that lists products that I have for sale on my website for that brand. A link would look something like this

• www.example.com/brands (list)
• www.example.com/brands/levi (details)
• www.example.com/brand/calvin-klein (details)

Given my scenario above, on the brand details page, do I have to use the Brand schema from schema.org? Or should I just use it for my own brand, namely my website? This is what I currently have:

<div class="container">
     <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Brand">
          <h1 itemprop="name">Calvin Klein</h1>
          <p itemprop="description">blah blah blah</p>
     </div>
</div>

If I were to include a URL, do I need to link it to my URL on my website, or to the brand's website?

Solution

What is the correct usage of using the brand schema from schema.org?

There is not one "correct usage" – it depends on what you want to convey.

If you want to say something about a brand, you can use Schema.org’s Brand type.

The Product type has the property brand, which takes a Brand item as value. This would allow you to reference the Brand from each of your Product items, for example by using Microdata’s itemref attribute:

<div itemprop="brand" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Brand" id="brand-ck">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Calvin Klein</h1>
  <p itemprop="description">blah blah blah</p>
</div>

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product" itemref="brand-ck">
  <!-- product 1 -->
</article>

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product" itemref="brand-ck">
  <!-- product 2 -->
</article>

If I were to include a url, do I need to link it to my url on my website, or to the band's website?

The url property takes the "URL of the item". This does not have to be the item’s official website (if it has one at all). On your site, you could specify the URL of your page about this brand.

If you want to link to the brand’s official website, you could use the sameAs property (bold emphasis mine):

URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity. E.g. the URL of the item's Wikipedia page, Freebase page, or official website.