This is pretty big news for the day.
Google has announced that forums can now add structured markup to both the forum discussion pages and the user's profiles so that Google can better track a user across the web. Essentially, it will help boost the Author's profile with first-hand experience and can provide a clear indication of first-hand expert knowledge on something.
Here's a link to how it all works - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/discussion-forum
Unlike other markup, Google recommends adding this as Microdata (RDFa). This will actually be much easier to implement for those people waiting on forum software to update with the new code. It allows you to get a jump start TODAY rather than in a few weeks. While Microdata is suggested, JSON-LD is still supported.
All this is great news, but I can also see some of the potentially bad side of things;
Either way, if you run a forum (hint hint @Artashes ), you'll want to jump on the implementation sooner rather than later. You may even get some of those coveted Rich Text snippets with regard to topics in search.
Google has announced that forums can now add structured markup to both the forum discussion pages and the user's profiles so that Google can better track a user across the web. Essentially, it will help boost the Author's profile with first-hand experience and can provide a clear indication of first-hand expert knowledge on something.
Here's a link to how it all works - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/discussion-forum
Unlike other markup, Google recommends adding this as Microdata (RDFa). This will actually be much easier to implement for those people waiting on forum software to update with the new code. It allows you to get a jump start TODAY rather than in a few weeks. While Microdata is suggested, JSON-LD is still supported.
All this is great news, but I can also see some of the potentially bad side of things;
- An influx of new spam as SEOs and others try to boost Author rank
- Lots of new posts, all being the same
- People faking who they are and what company they work for in order to perform a version of a Negative SEO attack
Either way, if you run a forum (hint hint @Artashes ), you'll want to jump on the implementation sooner rather than later. You may even get some of those coveted Rich Text snippets with regard to topics in search.