Implemented Markup improvements for Google

rrlevering

Google
Hi, my name is Ryan Levering and I currently handle structured data ingestion at Google (this guy). I've been doing some fairly spontaneous spot checks (not based on any specific problem) of some of the major forum software markups on the web just to see whether the markup is being generated in an ideal way for our systems to ingest. You can stick a URL in http://validator.schema.org to get an idea of what your markup for a given URL looks like. I have a couple of high-level suggestions to take or leave as you see fit:
  1. Include more than the OP with "http://schema.org/Comment" nodes through a "http://schema.org/comment" property. We're trying to normalize the forum markup space to use DiscussionForumPosting for the OP and attach Comment typed markup for the replies in a flat list (or threaded if you are a threaded forum). Without that, it makes it harder to segment the rest of the page appropriately in our index.
  2. Co-typing WebPage and DiscussionForumPosting like you do is going to confuse our ingestion a bit. If you squint it's not that inaccurate, but it would be clearer to either have WebPage (separate node) -> mainEntity -> DiscussionForumPosting or DiscussionForumPosting -> mainEntityOfPage -> WebPage (separate node). A co-typed self-cycle needs to be detected specially often.
  3. Include profile URLs in your author -> Person nodes. Raw names are not nearly as useful for disambiguation.
There's a couple other smaller things, but those are the things that would improve the markup the most. Note also you don't need to use JSON-LD if you are worried about duplicating contents/page size. Microdata is fine for text/content-heavy schema (though can be harder to author/inject).
 
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We just yesterday changed our (Google's) Search Console validation so that an image/video will also satisfy the content check. So as long as XenForo is including inline images in the markup (which I think it is) these should disappear shortly.
This is great news :)

Does this also fix warnings like
1717668394837.webp

which are reported for posts by guests (which obviously do not have a URL)?
 
I’ve already commented previously about those warnings here in this thread as well as again in the linked thread. I don’t have much more to add.
 
I had about 40 of them today, for the first time. In many cases they were 10+ year old discussions that had external images with missing/broken links. (but not all)
 
I had about 40 of them today, for the first time. In many cases they were 10+ year old discussions that had external images with missing/broken links. (but not all)
Same here. Many of the images had been once stored on Photobucket
 
I have 2895 posts missing "text", "image" or "video" and another 5179 missing "text". The first few I looked at were 2022/2023 threads, so relatively recent.

Fortunately, there are 1.32m posts in the green...
 
I have 2895 posts missing "text", "image" or "video" and another 5179 missing "text". The first few I looked at were 2022/2023 threads, so relatively recent.

Fortunately, there are 1.32m posts in the green...
We have thousands as well.

Just can't figure out what they actually mean. The error is pretty cryptic if you're not the developer.

We'll just have to hack our way through this until we come up with an answer.

If we find the issue I'll share it.
 
I have 2895 posts missing "text", "image" or "video" and another 5179 missing "text". The first few I looked at were 2022/2023 threads, so relatively recent.

Fortunately, there are 1.32m posts in the green...
Any update? Did the number on green posts decreased?
 
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