Code sample

Schema.org name vs headline

I’ve been tasked with adding schema.org markup to a website, which is something I’ve known about for quite a while, I even added some to OngoingWorlds, although still don’t really know what the benefit is apart from the obvious company name, address, opening hours, telephone number etc which I assume is what gets used when showing a company at the top of a SERP, or on Google maps. Useful for some things, like restaurants you’re googling, but not others.

Another example of data I assume comes from this sort of data is cinema times, and probably e-commerce website data showing on the Google “shopping” tab.

But that’s about all the examples I can think of, even though there’s looooads of different types of metadata you can add, including fictional characters in stories, accessibility hazards, audience, quests in games, and loads of others – problem is, if these aren’t presented in interesting or useful ways like the restaurant result example, then what’s the point?

There seems to be some duplication too. I was marking up the blog articles template (blog on schema.org) with things like author, publishedDate etc, (which are useful), but there’s also a headline and name.

Description of headline:

Headline of the article.

Description of name:

Text – The name of the item.

I wouldn’t be so bothered, but Google’s structured data testing tool is marking the lack of name as an error in red. Not sure how serious that is, but it’s RED!

Google structured data testing tool result showing errors

I’ve had a look at other examples, and The Guardian uses itemprop=”headline” on it’s main article title, ignoring name completely (hey they also use BEM, thats cool!). The Independent uses headline too, so I’m going to do what they do and ignore name.

Although, there’s a discussion on W3C to deprecate headline completely, in favour of name, which is more standard. So I don’t know what to believe!