Last updated April 20, 2019 by Patrick Coombe
If you’ve been around the SEO community for a while, you’ve probably noticed that the latest and greatest structured data type is JSON-LD.
In 2016 at SMX East in NYC, Gary Illyes at Google confirmed that Google was expanding their existing support for JSON-LD across more categories within Google search engine.
If you go to any conference right now, you’ll most likely hear a talk about schema markup, structured data, and of course JSON-LD.
Google is already very vocal about their support for JSON-LD and has even included it within their developer documentation suite. In fact, they didn’t just include it in their documentation but as of December 2015, it appears as though they’ve switched it to their default structured data type.
In addition to their developer documentation, they also mentioned JSON-LD in their AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages Project) which John Mueller of Google touted “the hottest new thing for 2016.”
As of December 2015, Google has mandated that all article schema must contain the author tag, which they recommend using JSON-LD. Cyrus Shepard from Moz noticed this and felt it was necessary to tweet about it.
There are a number of other ways Google search has been using JSON-LD recently. They’ve recently opened up access to the Knowledge Graph via Freebase via Google Knowledge Graph API and guess what it spits out? JSON-LD.
In January of 2016, they’ve added support for JSON-LD in review snippets. This was a big move for JSON-LD in the fact that review snippets are one of Google’s more popular types of snippet.
What Type of Schema Does Google Want You To Use:
In March of 2019, John Mueller of Google did a Webmaster Hangout (video) and was asked the following:
Someone asked the following question:
“What type of Schema markup is preferable for Google?
John Mueller answered:
“We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new structured data that are kind of come out for JSON-LD first. So that is what we prefer.”
I don’t think many people are surprised about this after all the bulk of the SEO community has been using JSON-LD for the last few years.
