By cml63

It’s clear that publishers are heavily utilizing this schema type for extremely competitive news articles that are based around big events. Oftentimes, we’re seeing this strategy result in prominent visibility in Top Stories and even the organic results.

How do you implement LiveBlogPosting schema?

So you have a big event that you want to optimize around and are interested in implementing LiveBlogPosting schema. What should you do?

1. Get whitelisted

The first thing you’ll need to do is get whitelisted by Google. If you have a Google representative that’s in contact with your organization, I recommend reaching out to them. There isn’t a lot of information out there on this and we can even see that Google has

Posted by cml63

One of the great things about doing SEO at an agency is that you’re constantly working on different projects you might not have had the opportunity to explore before. Being an SEO agency-side allows you to see such a large variety of sites that it gives you a more holistic perspective on the algorithm, and to work with all kinds of unique problems and implementations.

This year, one of the most interesting projects that we worked on at Go Fish Digital revolved around helping a large media company break into Google’s Top Stories for major single-day events.

When doing competitor research for the project, we discovered that one way many sites appear to be doing this is through use of a schema type called LiveBlogPosting. This sent us down a pathway of fairly deep research into what this structured data type is, how sites are using it, and what impact it might have on Top Stories visibility.

Today, I’d like to share all of the findings we’ve made around this schema type, and draw conclusions about what this means for search moving forward.

Who does this apply to?

With regards to LiveBlogPosting schema, the most relevant types of sites will be sites where getting into Google’s Top Stories is a priority. These sites will generally be publishers that regularly post news coverage. Ideally AMP will already be implemented, as the vast majority of Top Stories URLs are AMP compatible (this is not required, however).

Why non-publisher sites should still care

Even if your site isn’t a publisher eligible for Top Stories results, the content of this article may still provide you with interesting takeaways. While you might not be able to directly implement the structured data at this point, I believe we can use the findings of this article to draw conclusions about where the search engines are potentially headed.

If Google is ranking articles that are updated with regular frequency and even providing rich-features for this content, this might be an indication that Google is trying to incentivize the indexation of more real-time content. This structured data may be an attempt to help Google “fill a gap” that it has in terms of providing real-time results to its users.

While it makes sense that “freshness” ranking factors would apply most to publishers, there could be interesting tests that other non-publishers can perform in order to measure whether there is a positive impact to your site’s content.

What is LiveBlogPosting schema?

The LiveBlogPosting schema type is structured data that allows you to signal to search engines that your content is being updated in real-time. This provides search engines with contextual signals that the page is receiving frequent updates for a certain period of time.

The LiveBlogPosting structured data can be found on schema.org as a subtype of “Article” structured data. The official definition from the site says it is: “A blog post intended to provide a rolling textual coverage of an ongoing …read more

Source:: Moz Blog

Author: Aaron