JSON-LD Explained for Personal Websites(hawksley.dev) |
JSON-LD Explained for Personal Websites(hawksley.dev) |
This is fighting the last war, to stretch a metaphor.
As far as I and my WWW site are concerned, Google has nowadays switched to giving people lengthy LLM-generated versions of my stuff, with errors, above pointing people to my actual stuff. 'Breadcrumbs' and getting a pretty display name instead of the domain name, don't address the fact that Google de-prioritizes all of that, pretty tweaks or no, nowadays.
This is a lot of effort for stuff that people visiting my actual site directly will never see, and which people using Google will not find above the fold of its own massively LLM-ized version of stuff.
Even if google doesn't use it, the collective internet applying this kind of metadata makes the web fertile for non-LLM-scraping competitors to provide an alternative option.
Rolling over to google only ensures that they remain dominant, with a high bar for competitors, and driving them to use the same technologies.
All it did was train Google's AI so people would never leave Google.
Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
You’ll also notice that a lot of the information is relevant to only a small subset of sites. Rotten Tomatoes can publish the critic rating for movies using JSON-LD, but that’s not relevant for me (even if I write a review for a movie).
JSON-LD is nice because it’s easy and it is actually used by search engines. Yes, it can duplicate information in the web page itself, but I think the dream of perfectly annotating information so it only appears exactly once in your document is, well, a dream of spherical cows and massless ropes. It takes human effort to make a webpage and I am ok with a little duplication in the final product. My <h1> duplicates information in <title> anyway.
I had misunderstood the type field, because to me I was often just linking to a webpage, even if it is for a saas, the marketing page is still a webpage.
That said, JSON-LD has the default for a while now, much like how we largely abandoned REST for RPC. I'm not actually sure if microdata is still supported by all the important parsers today, I've defaulted to using LD for any site I've built for clients, especially ecommerce sites where I want Google Search exposure.
Edit: its worth noting the comparison with semantic HTML. Semantic HTML helps define the structure of the markup but not real world context like "this is a product for sale" or "this is a train schedule."
The JSON-LD I populate from the same data that I use to generate my site, and I use the JSON-LD metadata to generate things like index pages (list of blog posts from 2024, all posts related to topic X, etc). The main consumers of JSON-LD are search engines.
If you are interested in getting offended, then think about how we are also putting OpenGraph metadata in our web pages. Two different metadata formats for the same page.
From the article alone: what are the semantic elements for a person? A breadcrumb list? A software application? A blog? A blog posting?
Semantic HTML is there to aid humans using screen readers to navigate through generic elements like "navigation" or "article".
For example, there's no explicit property in schema's Person type [1] for a nickname. But the FOAF standard does [2].
Just add FOAF to the JSON-LD context:
{
"@context": {
"@vocab": "https://schema.org/",
"foaf": "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/",
"pronouns": "https://schema.org/pronouns"
}
"@type": "Person",
"givenName": "Timothy",
"familyName": "Berners-Lee",
"foaf:nick": "TBL",
I think you should just think about what metadata you actually care about, and the main metadata I care about (choose your own list) is authorship, publish date, last update, subject keywords, thumbnail (OpenGraph 1200x630), and summary.
There’s a long list of additional metadata that I could put in my webpages because there are standardized ways to do it, but, why bother?
Json-ld says: if you want to know whether the “title” property means the schema.org or the dublin core variant then you can find out which it is by <json-ld algorithm>
So you’d always use json-ld _with_ schema.org or something.
I tried using RDFa and liked the property that it was theoretically less redundant, but switched to JSON-LD because it JSON-LD is just easier to get working. And this is speaking as somebody who uses a hand-rolled static site generator—the issue here is that whether information is present in the raw HTML is something contextual, and if something isn’t present in the HTML then you need to put it somewhere else or it’s not mechanically parseable from the page. Like, to a human reader, a post on “Alice’s Blog” is assumed to be authored by Alice, so I may omit the “by Alice” text from the document, and then I would want to put that metadata in the page some other way.
Putting the metadata in JSON-LD lets me just be dumb about it. The metadata is always in JSON-LD, and the HTML may or may not contain an explicit representation of that same metadata. Easy.
But the JSON-LD does not need to contain the URL of the page (which is <link rel=canonical>) or the title (which is in <title>), for example.
For me, it depends on the project. For personal projects, I tend to use RDFa; otherwise, JSON-LD.
Ah, what a glorious fate to aspire to.
Most people I know who have maintained blogs do so to build their personal brand, normally because they make a living through writing or consulting. Gently influencing the pre-tuning weights of future models is just providing unpaid labor to hyperscalers.
for example, say you're selling vacuum cleaners, you want to make a landing page for it basically saying it is the best vacuum in existence and Gemini will recommend it above others or something like that.
LE: so if you're consulting for Elixir or whatever, maybe it can help to make a "hidden" page only for LLM search where you basically lie about yourself making yourself to be the utmost Elixir expert on the planet
Whether you show up in an LLM's search for "expert in <topic> near <location>" has any measurable impact is uncertain, but I wouldn't want that to be my source of traffic.
At this point complaining about the current/future state of search is just gonna make you into a grumpy old man. As always, accept the situation since you can not do anything to change it... and adapt