Google has updated its Structured Data forum documentation to clarify requirements related to authorship in the InteractionCounter schema.org data type and to add a new recommended property for the author type.
Both changes affect the way Google interprets information related to users who post comments in a forum.
It’s also interesting because it shows how interested Google is in identifying the authors of content, this time in the context of a forum.
Search results that include user-generated responses in the forums currently do not include author names.
But Google is increasingly doing more with authorship signals, such as displaying the names of news article authors, so it’s an open question whether to consider displaying forum usernames or whether Google will do something more with the author data behind the scenes.
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Structured data type InteractionCounter
A Schema.org structured data type is the main part of a particular section of structured data code. The property is just a description of this type of structured data.
In Schema.org jargon, a property is an attribute of the type.
The InteractionCounter Schema.org structured data type tells Google how many times an interaction has occurred with the author.
This is important because the InteractionCounter structured data has required properties of structured data. Required means that the use of the properties is required for eligibility to be displayed in Google Insights and other search results that include rich results.
The previous Google forum documentation for the InteractionCounter “type” was vague and only offered definitions of two “properties” associated with this type. It did not provide examples of the context of use of this data type and the two associated properties.
Google clarified this section to make it more obvious why the InteractionCounter type is important and useful for documenting various author interactions.
More details about interactionType
This is what Google changed in the Structured Data forum documentation.
The guide previously stated:
“Required properties interactionType Action See where it is used for a list of valid action subtypes for this property.”
Here’s what the new guide shows, with the changed text highlighted in italics:
“Required Properties interactionType Action Subtype For a list of valid action subtypes for this property, check the property that uses InteractionCounter (for example, statistical interaction).” Author added to required properties
Author.URL property
Another important change to the forum structured data guide is the addition of the author.url property of the Comment structured data type.
This change is also important because it is a required property that affects eligibility for forum-related rich results associated with Google Search.
This is the new guide that has been added:
“author.url URL A link to a web page that uniquely identifies the author of the post, probably a forum profile page. We recommend that you bookmark this page using structured profile page data.”
Read Google’s recently updated guide to structured forum data:
Discussion Forum (DiscussionForumPosting) structured data
Featured image by Shutterstock/Sergey Mastepanov
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