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Discussion Forum Structured Data

Google recently announced on November 27th that there is new Discussion Forum structured data markup that can be added to pages to help Google Search better identify online discussions across the web and make use of this markup in features such as Discussions and Forums and Perspectives (Source & Documentation).

Structured Data Requirements

The requirements for the structured data are to have the forum post / topic with the comments nested underneath. There are a number of options that can be taken from there depending on if posts are a standard topic and comment structure or more of a Q&A format. Although there are plenty of questions asked in the Community posts, we feel that the standard structure makes more sense. 

The structured data requirements and options are below:

• Required Properties
  • Author
    • Information about the author of the post. To help Google best understand authors across various features, we recommend following the author markup best practices.
  • author.name
    • The name of the author of the post.
  • datePublished 
    • The date and time the post was made in ISO 8601 format.
  • Either text / image / video
    • To represent the content of the post, you must include one of the following properties: text, image, video
• Recommended Properties 
  • comment
    • A comment about or response to the post, if applicable. Mark up comments in the order in which they appear on the page.
    • If used, the required properties for a comment are:
      • author 
      • datePublished 
      • text 
  • interactionStatistic 
    • User statistics applied to the main post, if applicable.
    • Google supports the following interactionTypes:
      • https://schema.org/LikeAction: The number of likes or upvotes.
      • https://schema.org/ViewAction: The number of views.
      • https://schema.org/CommentAction or https://schema.org/ReplyAction: The number of comments.

The integration of these structured data requirements is crucial for our platform's alignment with Google's best practices and overall content strategy. This will not only improve our content's visibility but also enhance user interaction. I strongly suggest incorporating these elements in your next roadmap update.