Implemented Markup improvements for Google

[rrlevering]

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).

 

[sdev]

Thanks for the feedback @rrlevering, really appreciated.
Unfortunately I can find evidence in our access logs that Googlebot crawls the URLs from itemid / @id.

If you want I can send you a PoC markup via DM.

Maybe it's just an identifier for them.

 

[rrlevering]

Thanks for the feedback @rrlevering, really appreciated.
Unfortunately I can find evidence in our access logs that Googlebot crawls the URLs from itemid / @id.

If you want I can send you a PoC markup via DM.

Does it do relative URL resolution as well? Like can you mask the URL as itemid="/post-1696275"? It's possible some of the URL discovery stuff is really aggressive for JS link detection or something but relative resolution would be less likely (though I guess not impossible).