🔔 This article was originally posted on my site, MihaiBojin.com. 🔔
I spent today learning about JSON for Linking Data and Structured Data for the Semantic Web.
I started from this good intro article and then made my way to Google's Advanced SEO pages.
I decided to implement this functionality for my site's articles, although there are other types I can implement later on.
Creating JSON+LD schema for my site was not as easy as I expected. I couldn't find any GatsbyJS or React plugins that did what I wanted out of the box. The closest one was react-schemaorg which seems to wrap the <script> tag generation - not something I'd use a plugin for.
In the end, I wrote code to generate the JSON+LD schema, based on the necessary props for this type.
As I was writing it, I was confused by the examples provided by Google, specifically which @type I should use between Article, NewsArticle, and BlogPosting.
As far as I can tell, there aren't any major differences from a SEO standpoint; I decided to go with the generic Article type.
I ended up with the following helper code (src/components/article-schema.js):
function ArticleSchema({
title,
description,
date,
lastUpdated,
tags,
image,
canonicalURL,
}) {
// load metadata defined in gatsby-config.js
const { siteMetadata } = useSiteMetadata();
// load the site's logo as a file/childImageSharp by its relative path
const { siteLogo } = useSiteLogo();
const authorProfiles = [
SITE_URL,
`https://twitter.com/${siteMetadata.social.twitter}/`,
`https://linkedin.com/in/${siteMetadata.social.linkedin}/`
`https://github.com/${siteMetadata.social.github}`
];
const img = image ? getImage(image.image) : null;
const imgSrc = image ? getSrc(image.image) : null;
const jsonData = {
'@context': `https://schema.org/`,
'@type': `Article`,
// helper that generates `'@type': 'Person'` schema
author: AuthorModel({
name: siteMetadata.author.name,
sameAs: authorProfiles,
}),
url: canonicalURL,
headline: title,
description: description,
keywords: tags.join(','),
datePublished: date,
dateModified: lastUpdated || date,
// helper that generates `'@type': 'ImageObject'` schema
image: ImageModel({
url: siteMetadata.siteUrl + imgSrc,
width: img?.width,
height: img?.height,
description: image.imageAlt,
}),
// helper that generates `'@type': 'Organization'` schema
publisher: PublisherModel({
name: siteMetadata.title,
// helper that generates `'@type': 'ImageObject'` schema
logo: ImageModel({
url: siteLogo.src,
width: siteLogo.image.width,
height: siteLogo.image.height,
}),
}),
mainEntityOfPage: {
'@type': `WebPage`,
'@id': siteMetadata.siteUrl,
},
};
return (
<Helmet>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{JSON.stringify(jsonData, undefined, 4)}
</script>
</Helmet>
);
}
ArticleSchema.defaultProps = {
tags: [],
};
ArticleSchema.propTypes = {
title: PropTypes.string.isRequired,
description: PropTypes.string.isRequired,
date: PropTypes.string,
lastUpdated: PropTypes.string,
tags: PropTypes.arrayOf(PropTypes.string),
image: PropTypes.object,
canonicalURL: PropTypes.string,
};
export default ArticleSchema;
Since, you can call react-helmet multiple times, I opted to call <ArticleSchema ... /> directly from blog-post.js, the component that renders my blog posts and articles.
Once everything was set-up, I tested the results in Google's rich results tester.
Here's the end result:
I then realized that including a <article> tag in HTML is also interpreted as Semantic Markup, competing with my JSON+LD definitions, duuuh!
I promptly removed the <article>, <header>, and <section> tags.
Since Google does not define itemProp in its schema, specifying it is superfluous, but for now I annotated the article's body as:
<div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: post.html}} itemProp="articleBody" />
I now have all my posts correctly configured to show up in Google's search gallery, which in time will hopefully result in more organic traffic to my articles!
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