Sites that don't employ this don't risk falling in their rankings. This added data allows for richer snippets (which absolutely increase clickthrough ratio), but that won't directly make you rank higher (or lower it their absence).
If your website employs an SEO or webstandardista, you should already have your sites marked up with metadata. Reviews and rich breadcrumbs etc. have been around and supported for years now.
I suppose that since Google wants to solve these problems algorithmically first and foremost, that many of these structures already get recognized. Right now you don't _have_ to mark-up your breadcrumbs, for them to still appear as rich snippets on your search result listing. Google recognized the structure without added mark-up.
For now, I will build the new types in my CMS like a good web developer. That won't cost me any time in the future, and now I'll have a way to separate myself from those that won't add schema's or metadata to their mark-up. So, at the end of the day, I just got more expensive :)
"Google currently supports rich snippets for people, events, reviews, products, recipes, and breadcrumb navigation, and you can use the new schema.org markup for these types, just as with our regular markup formats. Because we’re always working to expand our functionality and improve the relevance and presentation of our search results, schema.org contains many new types that Google may use in future applications."
"Google doesn’t use markup for ranking purposes at this time—but rich snippets can make your web pages appear more prominently in search results, so you may see an increase in traffic."
Google likely uses clickthrough rate (CTR) in their algo. If your site has a high CTR, it should hypothetically rank higher, so it makes sense for them to include it in their algorithm - to the point that it can't be manipulated.
So, if the metadata doesn't directly increase rankings (which I'm pretty positive it won't), it can indirectly do so by grabbing the users eye and improving CTR, which I am most certain it will.
If your website employs an SEO or webstandardista, you should already have your sites marked up with metadata. Reviews and rich breadcrumbs etc. have been around and supported for years now.
I suppose that since Google wants to solve these problems algorithmically first and foremost, that many of these structures already get recognized. Right now you don't _have_ to mark-up your breadcrumbs, for them to still appear as rich snippets on your search result listing. Google recognized the structure without added mark-up.
For now, I will build the new types in my CMS like a good web developer. That won't cost me any time in the future, and now I'll have a way to separate myself from those that won't add schema's or metadata to their mark-up. So, at the end of the day, I just got more expensive :)