Using JSON-LD to extend SEO potential (forum, comments etc)

[Nutterum]

Hi Guys,

Recently I got involved in a discussion regarding lost SEO and Keyword potential. One of the things we rigorously discussed was, whether it is a good idea to crawl, index and structured data map, website modules like forums, comment sections, feedback portals, etc.

Now obviously on a first glance this should be a no-brainer and must be done, as it is a unique content that can help with the keyword diversification. However many argues it is hard to achieve, map and crawl. After an hour of heated debate, there was one proposition, about using the JSON-LD markup to safely achieve the above-mentioned indexation.

My question is, have you worked on similar ideas? What is your take on trying to push these website sections to Google and did they work for you?

[goodroi]

This seems to make a big assumption that most forums and comments are quality content. Some websites have run into panda problems because they relied too much on user generated content without ensuring a certain quality standard. If your forum is mostly anemic pages you are probably better off blocking the content than trying to flood Google with low quality pages.

[Nutterum]

The purpose of the content is highly niche. Everything from Angular to Winforms app development. There is trash content there as with any forum, however the monitoring of bad, spammy or non-relevant topics is high. Currently the people I discussed my concerns and ideas went ahead and implemented the JSON-LD on the forum. Haven't heard of the results yet (I guess it is too early to tell) but they did achieve what they wanted - 25,000 items were marked and crawled. Now it's time to see whether they will move the needle.

[JS_Harris]

Right around the time Google essentially abandoned feedburner and discontinued blog search I began removing JSON-LD and all "feed" capabilities from my websites and have never regretted it. I prefer to offer only one version, albeit an optimized version compatible with most devices, of my content. For the services that require my site to send a signal I process a cron job once per day specifically for these services to say "hey, new content here" so that they can come and look.

I don't appear on sites that just grab my title and a snippet to post on their sites anymore and it hasn't hurt my rankings any. Any gain I could get would be offset by the quality factor of having said title and snippet be duplicate in a lot of places, imo. JSON-LD might work for some but I passed without regret.