JSON-LD Explained for Personal Websites

> It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking.

This is fighting the last war, to stretch a metaphor.

As far as I and my WWW site are concerned, Google has nowadays switched to giving people lengthy LLM-generated versions of my stuff, with errors, above pointing people to my actual stuff. 'Breadcrumbs' and getting a pretty display name instead of the domain name, don't address the fact that Google de-prioritizes all of that, pretty tweaks or no, nowadays.

This is a lot of effort for stuff that people visiting my actual site directly will never see, and which people using Google will not find above the fold of its own massively LLM-ized version of stuff.

I would encourage people who have the pragmatic bent to read about JSON-LD from the Google documentation for web sites;

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...

You’ll also notice that a lot of the information is relevant to only a small subset of sites. Rotten Tomatoes can publish the critic rating for movies using JSON-LD, but that’s not relevant for me (even if I write a review for a movie).

JSON-LD is nice because it’s easy and it is actually used by search engines. Yes, it can duplicate information in the web page itself, but I think the dream of perfectly annotating information so it only appears exactly once in your document is, well, a dream of spherical cows and massless ropes. It takes human effort to make a webpage and I am ok with a little duplication in the final product. My <h1> duplicates information in <title> anyway.

Do these attributes actually help with search engine visibility or do they just make it easier for search engines to keep users from leaving the search page? Honest question here.

Super useful article, wish that had existed in my seo days.

I had misunderstood the type field, because to me I was often just linking to a webpage, even if it is for a saas, the marketing page is still a webpage.

We have semantic HTML, but for some weird reason we need to yet again re-express the semantic meaning of our website in bespoke weird JSON in a script tag that the browser won't process.

A bit disappointing that (IIUC) for the common parsers you have to say everything twice, in HTML and in the accompanying JSON-LD form even though RDFa exists for the exact purpose of letting you point at the values already present in your markup. (Admittedly RDFa is perhaps too flexible for its own good when you just want to mark up some stuff, but if you’re writing a full parser anyway dealing with a bit of excessive cleverness in the format should not be too bad.)