Blog comments in rich result data for Google search (with two potential options)

Structured data is typically quite important for Google to display your website's pages / blog posts properly in search results; but while I set out to build the Better Blog Comments app for Shopify, I stumbled upon the realization that...

Google doesn't actually support for blog comments in the Article structured data properties.

That's right, according to the Google documentation on article structured data (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/article) Google does not indicate that blog comments are scanned, indexed, or understood by Google's search results.
This is a bit of a bummer, as this could be an amazing opportunity if Google started indexing this data and displaying it in search results for users to see and interact with.
As you have probably seen, blog comments can be a fantastic way for your readers / users to interact with your content and start a discussion in your blog; displaying this in Google results makes perfect sense to me, so it is a little confusing why Google doesn't support this (supposedly).

Two options, both with caveats.

While the Article structured data type does not support comments, there are two options that Google's rich result test properly accepts, but both come with some caveats.

1. Use the (somewhat supported) BlogPosting structured data type.

Google's documentation mentions the BlogPosting data type as being accepted as Article structured data. This was news to me (I didn't know there were other accepted data types, in general) and you can read more about the BlogPosting schema here: https://schema.org/BlogPosting


This is interesting, as the BlogPosting schema allows for much more detail into the blog post on your website, including blog comment data!
The major caveat, though: Google mentions that they right now only supports a few properties from any of the accepted Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting schemas:

The Google-supported properties are the following:

  • author
  • author.name
  • author.url
  • dateModified
  • datePublished
  • headline
  • image

Read about that here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/article#article-types

What this tells me is that, while the BlogPosting schema accepts the comment data, Google's algorithm doesn't seem to actually index it at this point.

My thinking is that eventually Google will support this data (I hope), and if that is the case; implementing this BlogPosting schema with blog comment data is not a bad idea for now. It surely doesn't come with any downsides, and has the potential upside of Google potentially supporting the full schema in the future.

My recommendation:

Use this, but don't expect any results any time soon.

If you want to see how to implement the BlogPosting schema on your Shopify store (if you are using Better Blog Comments), take a look at this help document to help you add the code to your store theme: TODO.

2. Implement the DiscussionForumPosting schema on your blog post.

Besides the BlogPosting schema above, Google does have another schema type that supports user comments. This is the DiscussionForumPosting schema - typically used for forum websites that have threaded posts with user comments going back and forth (my favourite kind of website, personally).

Here is an example of what that schema looks like:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DiscussionForumPosting",
  "headline": "Very Popular Thread",
  ...
  "comment": [{
    "@type": "Comment",
    "text": "This should not be this popular",
    ...
    "comment": [{
      "@type": "Comment",
      "text": "Yes it should",
      ...
    }]
  }]
}

It is relatively easy to add this schema to your website by following the Google documentation, or again by following our guide for Shopify stores with our app installed here: TODO.

The major caveat, though:

Google quite clearly does not want us using this schema for blog posts:

While we encourage valid markup of other types (Article, ImageObject, VideoObject) that can use very similar markup with comments, author information, interaction statistics, those should not use DiscussionForumPosting markup. Here are some examples:

Valid use cases:

  • A community forum page where users can talk about a certain game
  • A generic forum platform hosting a wide variety of subforum content
  • A social media platform where users can post and reply to comments or media
Invalid use cases:
  • An article or blog written directly by an agent for the website (even with comments)
  • User reviews about a product

This is not ideal.

I don't think Google will penalize you for mislabeling the schema data on your blog post here, but I don't expect that they will be too impressed either.

In saying this, a recent user of Better Blog Comments proposed the situation that they use on their store, where the utilize the blog comment app in a way that is more heavily reliant on the comments/discussion than the blog content, in fact there is no blog content besides the title of the article.

In this case, I implemented the DiscussionForumPosting schema on his site, and Google is happily testing it and indexing it from our tests so far. I believe this is a bit of a gamble, but again I don't see a world where Google would penalize the rest of your site for classifying your blog post as a forum discussion post instead.

My recommendation:

Use this method with caution. It is the closest you will get to having blog comments show up in actual Google search results; but just know that Google might not like it.

What's next?

Besides the two options above, our options are unfortunately pretty bleak for properly displaying blog comments in Google Search Results, for now. I am hopeful that with the coming age of AI content, Google users will start relying on (hopefully) human comments and discussions to better inform themselves. If this happens, Google will surely start to take note and implement native blog comment schema into the Article structured data type.

Have you found a better option here? I'd love to hear thoughts from anyone who has gone down this road before.

 

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