The Article Schema Content Type is essential in order for you to enhance your articles appearance on Google Search. Your articles will have an increased likelihood of appearing in search results with rich result features or appearing in a top stories carousel.
Update 19 Sep: Google will no longer display rich review snippets for Article Schema
Google announced on Monday, 16th of Sep 2019, an algorithm update to review snippets to ease implementation. According to that update, there's now a clear set of schema types that can display the rich review (Stars) snippet in the search results and the Article schema is not one of them anymore.
How are my Article schema pages affected?
Here's how your pages marked up with the Article Content Type are affected:
1. The review rich snippet (Stars) will not show up in the search results for those pages anymore.
2. If you test one of those pages with the Google Structured Data Testing Tool you will now get the following 2 errors:
Error 1The name of the reviewed item is not specified in the review.Article is not a type of target considered valid for the itemReviewed property.How can I fix these errors?
These errors are triggered by the aggregateRating property which no longer supported by the Article schema and needs to be removed from the JSON-LD code. To do so, edit your structured data items and disable both the Rating Value and Review Count options as shown in the picture below.
Bear in mind this is a temporary solution in order to make Google Structured Data Testing Tool happy and ensure no structured data errors. A new version of the Google Structured Data extension is going to be released soon that will comply with the new Google guidelines.
Update 03 Oct: Since Google Structured Data v4.2.0 the Rating Value and Review Count properties have been removed from the Article schema settings and they are no longer added in the markup ensuring 100% compatibility with the Google guidelines.
I still have questions about the Google update
If you still have questions or need clarifications on how this algorithm update is going to affect your site, it's recommended to visit the Google Structured Data Official Help Community to ask your questions and get an answer from a Google expert.
How to markup Joomla Pages with the Article Schema
From the main menu choose Components -> Google Structured Data. Click on Items from the left sidebar and then on the New button to create a new Structured Data Item.
On the next page, you will need to prepare the Structured Data Item. Enter a Title (it can be anything) and select the Article Content Type from the respective dropdown.
Next, click to save the Structured Data Item. Once the page reloads, a new section called Article appears below where you can map each property with page data.
To read more details on how the mapping works, visit the respective section in the How to Add Structured Data to Pages guide.
Article Schema Properties
Here's a table of the properties you can define in the Article Content Type.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | The headline of the article. Headlines should not exceed 110 characters. |
| Description | The main text of the article. |
| Author | The author of the article. |
| Image | The image of the article. |
| Date Published | The date and time the article was first published. |
| Date Modified | The date and time the article was most recently modified. |
