Discussion forum (DiscussionForumPosting) structured data

Discussion forum markup is designed for any forum-style site where people collectively share
first-hand perspectives. When forum sites add this markup, Google Search can better identify online
discussions across the web and make use of this markup in features such as
Discussions and Forums.

How to use DiscussionForumPosting within a forum

In general, we recommend nesting comments under the post they relate to.
If the forum has its own threading structure, use a tree of comments to represent its structure:

If it’s more linear in nature (for example, an original post followed by a series of replies),
nest them all under the original post as comments. Ideally, later pages of content in multi-page forums
include the original post with the main page URL:

If the URL is primarily about a single post, use mainEntity
(or mainEntityOfPage) to identify the primary
DiscussionForumPosting:

For web pages that have a list of posts (for example, on a profile, topic, or category page),
it’s common that they don’t have all the information present on the same page and require the user
to click to get the extra information (like replies). It’s up to you whether you choose to include
only the information that is present on the page (and include the URL to the discussion-specific
posting).

Don’t mark one post on the page as a main entity if it’s not a discussion page for the
post. To show that pages are a related set of posts, it might be useful to attach them
all to a
Collection
or ItemList .

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 the required properties. 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.

Examples

The following markup example shows a non-threaded, linear forum page: