Google Forum Structured Data Update Focused On Authorship

Google updated their documentation of forum structured data to clarify authorship related requirements to the InteractionCounter schema.org data type and to add a new recommended property for the author type.

Both changes affect how Google interprets information related to users who are posting comments in a forum.

It’s additionally of interest because it shows how interested Google is in pinpointing the authors of content, this time within the context of a forum.

Search results that feature user generated answers from forums currently do not feature author names.

But Google is increasingly doing more with authorship signals such as showing the names of authors of news articles so it’s an open question whether showing forum user names is something being considered or if Google will be doing something else with author data behind the scenes.

Read: What is Google E-E-A-T?