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Article (Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting) structured data

Adding Article structured data to your news, blog, and sports
article pages can help Google understand more about the web page and show better title text,
images, and date information
for the article in search results on Google Search and other properties
(for example, Google News and the Google Assistant).
While there’s no markup requirement to be eligible for Google News
features like Top stories,
you can add Article to more explicitly tell Google what your content is
about (for example, that it’s a news article, who the author is, or what the title of the article is).

Article rich result

Example

Here’s an example of a page with Article structured data.

JSON-LD

Microdata

How to add structured data

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page
content. If you’re new to structured data, you can learn more about
how structured data works.

Here’s an overview of how to build, test, and release structured data.

  1. Add as many recommended properties that apply
    to your web page. There are no required properties; instead, add the properties that apply to
    your content. Based on the format you’re using, learn where to
    insert structured data on the page.
  2. Follow the guidelines.
  3. Validate your code using the
    Rich Results Test
    and fix any critical errors. Consider also fixing any non-critical issues that may be flagged
    in the tool, as they can help improve the quality of your structured data (however, this isn’t necessary to be eligible for rich results).
  4. Deploy a few pages that include your structured data and use the URL Inspection tool to test how Google sees the page. Be sure that your page is
    accessible to Google and not blocked by a robots.txt file, the noindex tag, or
    login requirements. If the page looks okay, you can
    ask Google to recrawl your URLs.
  5. To keep Google informed of future changes, we recommend that you
    submit a sitemap. You can automate this with the
    Search Console Sitemap API.

Guidelines

You must follow these guidelines to enable structured data to be eligible for inclusion in Google Search results.

Technical guidelines

  • For multi-part articles, make sure that the rel=canonical points at either
    each individual page or a “view-all” page (and not to page 1 of a multi-part series). Learn
    more about canonicalization.
  • If you offer subscription-based access to your website content, or if users must register
    for access, consider adding structured data for
    subscription and paywalled content.

Structured data type definitions

To help Google better understand your page, include as many recommended properties that apply
to your web page. There are no required properties; instead, add the properties that apply to
your content.

Article objects

Article objects must be based on one of the following
schema.org types: Article,
NewsArticle, BlogPosting.

The Google-supported properties are the following:

Recommended properties
author

Person or Organization

The author of the article. To help Google best understand authors across various features,
we recommend following the author markup best practices.

author.name

Text

The name of the author.

author.url

URL

A link to a web page that uniquely identifies the author of the article. For example, the
author’s social media page, an “about me” page, or a bio page.

If the URL is an internal profile page, we recommend marking up that author using
profile page structured data.

dateModified

DateTime

The date and time the article was most recently modified, in ISO 8601 format.
We recommend that you provide timezone information; otherwise, we will default to the timezone used by Googlebot.

Add the dateModified property if you want to provide more accurate date information to Google.
The Rich Results Test doesn’t show a warning for this property,
as it’s only recommended if you decide that it’s applicable to your site.

datePublished

DateTime

The date and time the article was first published, in
ISO 8601 format.
We recommend that you provide timezone information; otherwise, we will default to the timezone used by Googlebot.

Add the datePublished property if you want to provide more
accurate date information to Google. The
Rich Results Test doesn’t show a
warning for this property, as it’s only recommended if you decide that it’s applicable to your site.

headline

Text

The title of the article. Consider using a concise title, as long titles may be truncated on some devices.

image

Repeated ImageObject or URL

The URL to an image that is representative of the article. Use images that are relevant
to the article, rather than logos or captions.

Additional image guidelines:

  • Image URLs must be crawlable and indexable. To check if Google can access your URLs, use
    the URL Inspection tool.
  • Images must represent the marked up content.
  • Images must be in a file format that’s supported by Google Images.
  • For best results, we recommend providing multiple high-resolution images (minimum of 50K pixels when
    multiplying width and height) with the following aspect ratios: 16×9, 4×3, and 1×1.

For example:

Author markup best practices

To help Google best understand and represent the author of the content, we recommend following
these best practices when specifying authors in markup:

Best practices for author markup

Include all authors in the markup

Make sure that all the authors that are presented as authors on the web page are also included in markup.

Specifying multiple authors

When specifying multiple authors, list each author in their own author field:

Don’t merge multiple authors in the same author field:

Use additional fields

To help Google better understand who the author is, we strongly recommend using the
type and url (or sameAs)
properties. Use valid URLs for the url or sameAs properties.

For example, if the author is a person, you could link to an author’s page that
provides more information about the author:

If the author is an organization, you could link to the organization’s home page.

Only specify the author’s name in the author.name property

In the author.name property, only specify the name of the author. Don’t add
any other piece of information. More specifically, don’t add the following information:

  • The name of the publisher. Instead, use the publisher property.
  • The author’s job title. Instead, use the appropriate property if you want to specify
    that information (jobTitle).
  • Honorific prefix or suffix. Instead, use the appropriate property if you want to
    specify that information (honorificPrefix
    or honorificSuffix).
  • Introductory words (for example, don’t include words like “posted by”).

Use the appropriate Type

Use the Person type for people, and the Organization type
for organizations. Don’t use the Thing type, and don’t use the wrong type
(for example, using the Organization type for a person).

Here’s an example that applies the author markup best practices:

Troubleshooting

If you’re having trouble implementing or debugging structured data, here are some resources that
may help you.

  • If you’re using a content management system (CMS) or someone else is taking care of your site,
    ask them to help you. Make sure to forward any Search Console message that details the issue to them.
  • Google does not guarantee that features that consume structured data will show up in search results.
    For a list of common reasons why Google may not show your content in a rich result, see the
    General Structured Data Guidelines.
  • You might have an error in your structured data. Check the
    list of structured data errors
    and the Unparsable structured data report.
  • If you received a structured data manual action against your page, the structured data on
    the page will be ignored (although the page can still appear in Google Search results). To fix
    structured data issues, use the Manual Actions report.
  • Review the guidelines again to identify if your content isn’t compliant
    with the guidelines. The problem can be caused by either spammy content or spammy markup usage.
    However, the issue may not be a syntax issue, and so the Rich Results Test won’t be able to
    identify these issues.
  • Troubleshoot missing rich results / drop in total rich results.
  • Allow time for re-crawling and re-indexing. Remember that it may take several days after
    publishing a page for Google to find and crawl it. For general questions about crawling and indexing, check the
    Google Search crawling and indexing FAQ.
  • Post a question in the Google Search Central forum.
Alien Road

How we apply this

Article markup is the baseline for every publisher and blog we manage. Getting the headline, author and date fields right is what makes the rest of the news and Discover surfaces reachable.

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