Google now supports discussion forum and profile page structured data

[Mike G.]

This is a big move by Google with the potential to showcase more forum content in search as well as highlight members of the community. Sharing this here hoping it can be natively added to IC5 🤞

Snippets below

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New in structured data: discussion forum and profile page markup

Today we're announcing support for profile page and discussion forum structured data for use in Google Search, including new reports in Search Console. This markup works with Google Search features that are designed to show first-person perspectives from social media platforms, forums, and other communities. Implementing this structured data will help ensure what Search shows in these features is as accurate and complete as possible.

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Discussion forum (DiscussionForumPosting) structured data

In general, we recommend nesting comments under the post they relate to. If the forum has its own threading structure, use a tree of comments to represent its structure

If it's more linear in nature (for example, an original post followed by a series of replies), nest them all under the original post as comments. Ideally, later pages of content in multi-page forums include the original post with the main page URL

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Profile page (ProfilePage) structured data

The primary focus of the page must be a single person or organization that is affiliated with the overall website. Here are some examples of profile pages:

Valid use cases:

• A user profile page on a forum or social media site
• An author page on a news site
• An "About Me" page on a blog site
• An employee page on a company website

Invalid use cases:

• The main home page of a store (usually contains lots of non-profile info)
• An organization review site (the organization isn't associated with the website)

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@Daniel F - Tagging you in case you haven't come across this yet. I know you make THE SEO application and probably have as much SEO knowledge as anyone in the space.

[Mike G.]

Changes to Q&A markup

Google also updated its Q&A markup to say if you are already using Q&A markup for your question and answer user forums. The company is updating the Q&A structured data documentation to be more in line with the richness of the new discussion forum guidelines. You don’t need to use both types of structured data on the same page. You should instead use the one that’s best suited to your use case:

• Q&A forums: If your forum is structured by a question that’s followed by answers, use Q&A markup.
• For general forums: If your forum structure is more general and isn’t strictly question and answer content, use DiscussionForumPosting.

Documentation: Q&A (QAPage) structured data

[Daniel F]

We’re already providing support for  ProfilePage and DiscussionForumPosting.

I have also made recently some adjustments to the QA stuff which will be included in a future release.

[Mike G.]

27 minutes ago, Daniel F said:

We’re already providing support for  ProfilePage and DiscussionForumPosting.

I have also made recently some adjustments to the QA stuff which will be included in a future release.

Sorry for the false alarm in that case, but that is great to hear it's already implemented. Thank you!

In that case, glad that GOOGLE is finally catching up with the times 😃

[InsanelyMacP]

2 hours ago, Daniel F said:

We’re already providing support for  ProfilePage and DiscussionForumPosting.

I have also made recently some adjustments to the QA stuff which will be included in a future release.

Very much looking forward to the new version

[darth12]

3 hours ago, Daniel F said:

We’re already providing support for  ProfilePage and DiscussionForumPosting.

I have also made recently some adjustments to the QA stuff which will be included in a future release.

Awesome to hear - thanks! Also tagging @Marc Stridgen as I had spoken to him about it on another thread earlier.

[AlexWebsites]

Does it still make sense to disallow profile page crawling in invision optimized robots.txt settings?

# Block profile pages as these have little unique value, consume a lot of crawl time and contain hundreds of 301 links
Disallow: /profile/

 

[Matt]

We are chatting about this internally and I think we agree that there is now value in letting most profiles be indexed. We still want to avoid 'thin' content pages for members who haven't posted, or perhaps haven't posted in years.

[Canis]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

we agree that there is now value in letting most profiles be indexed.

Can you explain the reason behind this?

[Matt]

16 minutes ago, Canis said:

Can you explain the reason behind this?

See the links in the original post. Google are making large changes to how forum posts are presented in their search results and they include more data on the author including a link to their profile page.

If you do not want to have profiles indexed, then you can simply adjust the robots.txt via the ACP to exclude them again.

We would still add 'noindex' meta tags to profile without any valuable content to avoid loads of thin pages being indexed and sucking up the crawl budget.

[sudo]

As much as I like the idea but Google has a habit of snarfing the content to remove the need for people to click the link which would result in less traffic and members to the site.

I kinda fear this is a bit of a trojan horse.

Edited November 28, 2023 by sudo

[Marc]

37 minutes ago, sudo said:

As much as I like the idea but Google has a habit of snarfing the content to remove the need for people to click the link which would result in less traffic and members to the site.

I suppose it depends on point of view. Personally, I find I click things more when I see what may be an answer to the question I've put into google, to ensure thats what Im looking for

[Matt]

We can provide the tools and you can decide how to use them. Google taking forum content seriously after years of "user generated content" being rated down can only be a good thing overall.

[AlexJ]

Google is taking seriously because of all the rush to get good data for AI models/search display and competition is getting spicy with Bing. 

[Mike G.]

56 minutes ago, AlexJ said:

Google is taking seriously because of all the rush to get good data for AI models/search display and competition is getting spicy with Bing. 

I don't believe in this instance that's the case. I believe it has more to do with all the garbage SEO content taking over search and it's getting even worse due to AI. As it continues to get tougher to distinguish between AI content and human content, first-hand experience and demonstration of real knowledge are becoming more of a focus in Google.

A Google Engineer has been advising on how to improve and better position forum content in search since March. Recently Google's been actively showing more 'Perspectives' content on mobile as well as highlighting Discussions and Forums. Until now, most of those results have been from Reddit and Quora. These changes should help showcase more variety.

Engineer's Quote:

"And most importantly, thanks for making changes. It heartens me to see forum platforms moving to expose their content better. I really would like to see this content more in search results rather than low quality, over-optimized rehash articles."

I work for a publisher that is investing heavily in AI. I see it across many other publishers as well and it's only going to continue to ramp up. I hate the direction publishers are heading in and if Google doesn't get ahead of it, searchers aren't going to be able to trust any of the results Google delivers. There's a reason so many people add 'Reddit' to the end of their searches now.

User-generated content and real-life experience are becoming more and more important.

Edited November 28, 2023 by FanClub Mike

[Dreadknux]

This is a very interesting development on the SEO/Google Search side. I definitely hear the concerns about opening things up so wide, but on the other hand if it can help position my community's content on the same level as content posted on social media that can only be a good thing in my eyes.

Since we're talking about this, I figure it might be worth asking a (sort of) related question to IPS: are there any considerations being made as to how different node content is being served/displayed on Google Search results? For example, how prominently a community's forum topic might appear under a search result as opposed to an Event entry, or a CMS Pages record?

One reason why I ask, is that I have CMS Pages databases that have relationships with certain forums (so comments on the CMS Page record and the Forum Topic are practically identical), but in the case that someone searches for some terms I'd rather the CMS Page record be the primary result (and maybe a nested result for the forum topic version of that same content underneath). But I don't know how much control IPS has over that sort of thing, or whether that's something that it entirely in Google's power/wisdom to design.

So call it a question of curiosity rather than a proper SEO-related feature request. 😄

[AlexJ]

On 11/28/2023 at 11:45 AM, FanClub Mike said:

User-generated content and real-life experience are becoming more and more important.

I think we are saying the same thing for AI and that's what i mean by training AI models i.e. to provide better/accurate results. Same thing happening in banks as well, where AI results are used to check anomaly. I think it's industry wide adaptation ongoing at present. 

Also, Microsoft is pushing hard with their co-pilot program or bing chat. So Google is improving as well since their major revenue of 50-60% is from adds. 

Competition is always good for consumers. 

 

[Matt]

9 hours ago, Dreadknux said:

This is a very interesting development on the SEO/Google Search side. I definitely hear the concerns about opening things up so wide, but on the other hand if it can help position my community's content on the same level as content posted on social media that can only be a good thing in my eyes.

Since we're talking about this, I figure it might be worth asking a (sort of) related question to IPS: are there any considerations being made as to how different node content is being served/displayed on Google Search results? For example, how prominently a community's forum topic might appear under a search result as opposed to an Event entry, or a CMS Pages record?

One reason why I ask, is that I have CMS Pages databases that have relationships with certain forums (so comments on the CMS Page record and the Forum Topic are practically identical), but in the case that someone searches for some terms I'd rather the CMS Page record be the primary result (and maybe a nested result for the forum topic version of that same content underneath). But I don't know how much control IPS has over that sort of thing, or whether that's something that it entirely in Google's power/wisdom to design.

So call it a question of curiosity rather than a proper SEO-related feature request. 😄

It's an interesting question but I don't think we'll have that much influence over what Google decides short of 301 redirecting forum content to the CMS content which would be a terrible idea. 😅

[Dreadknux]

11 minutes ago, Matt said:

It's an interesting question but I don't think we'll have that much influence over what Google decides short of 301 redirecting forum content to the CMS content which would be a terrible idea. 😅

Haha fair enough! I'm not super au fait with the inner workings of Google so I figured it was worth asking the experts! 😄

[Matt]

3 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

I figured it was worth asking the experts!

I'll let you know if they show up. 😅

[Mike G.]

2 hours ago, AlexJ said:

I think we are saying the same thing for AI and that's what i mean by training AI models i.e. to provide better/accurate results. Same thing happening in banks as well, where AI results are used to check anomaly. I think it's industry wide adaptation ongoing at present. 

Also, Microsoft is pushing hard with their co-pilot program or bing chat. So Google is improving as well since their major revenue of 50-60% is from adds. 

Competition is always good for consumers. 

 

Sorry for the confusion, I completely misinterpreted your message. Thanks for the follow-up!

[InsanelyMacP]

4.7.14 not included new markups? =(

[Marc]

8 hours ago, InsanelyMacP said:

4.7.14 not included new markups? =(

As much as we would love to be that quick, 4.7.14 is a maintenance release for bug fixing 🙂 We have it covered, dont worry. But it will take some time for new things to be included

[InsanelyMacP]

@Marc Stridgen  Hey, any news?

[Marc]

Im not sure what news you would be hoping for here, as we are still on 4.7.14. As mentioned above, it will take some time for new items like this to be included. Its not likely something you are going to see over the course of a few weeks unfortunately.