In a Google Webmaster Hangout, someone asked Google’s Webmaster Trends Analysis John Mueller about schema structured data and Expertise, Authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
John Mueller offered insight into how how Google recognizes author information.
Question About Increasing E-A-T
Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness are abbreviated as E-A-T. The question was about communicating author information. There is an SEO idea that an author page or displaying author information is useful for ranking well. It’s beyond dispute that E-A-T in content is important. However, John Mueller’s answer did not confirm that author E-A-T is a ranking signal. Mueller’s answer emphasized doing what is good for users. This is the question:“To increase the E-A-T of a medical page, should I use article schema or for example web page or medical web page as the latter has the option for reviewed by property? Or Google can find that the article was reviewed from the context if I provide such details (and schema property reviewed by is not necessary)?”The question assumes that Schema.org structured data can increase the expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of a web page. Structured Data does not confer any such thing. Telling Google you are expert is not the same as being expert. Structured data is simply a way to communicate information. It doesn’t communicate signals of quality. Mueller answered that using structured data was up to the publisher and that authorship information was gathered by Google “through a number of ways.” This is what Mueller answered:
“That’s kind of up to you. We do try to recognize these additional details about information about the author, information about the reviewers, about the website overall through a number of ways. …partially through the content directly. So kind of similar to how users would see it if they go to the page and they see… information about who has reviewed this content or who has provided it… that’s really useful.”
Structured Data Spam
It must be pointed out that putting information in the structured data that does not exist in the web page itself can be viewed as spam and result in a manual action. This is what Google’s Structured Data Guidelines says:“Don’t mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page. For example, if the JSON-LD markup describes a performer, the HTML body should describe that same performer.”John Mueller didn’t warn about the dangers of misusing structured data. However he did say how it’s not useful for users.
“If it’s just… hidden away in structured data then that’s not very useful for users (because users tend not to use view source when looking at a page to determine whether or not they should trust it. I would try to find an approach that works well primarily for users and focus on that. “
Which Structured Data to Use?
Mueller then addressed which structured data to use, article or whatever. Mueller simply stated to use what was appropriate.“Depending on the page that you have, I would try to pick the appropriate one…”That’s it. Just pick what’s appropriate.
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