External nofollow links in Schema.org JSON-LD items

Question

I'm currently setting up a site where I have a couple of items from external sources that I would like to structure according to ItemList.

The provided URLs in that list, however, are external links, which clashes with the Schema.org definition, where the itemUrl has to be an internal link.

My current problem is, that Google indexes those links, so I would like to add something like rel="nofollow", but I wasn't able to find an according option for that. Does anyone know how this could be handled?

Here a sample of my implementation:

{
    "@type": "ListItem",
    "position": "{{ loop.index }}",
    "item":{
      "@type": "Product",
      "name": "{{ itemName }}",
      "manufacturer": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "{{ customName }}"
      },
      "color": "{{ itemColour }}",
      "model": {
        "@type": "ProductModel",
        "name": "{{ customName1 }}"
      },
      "url": "{{ itemUrl }}",
      "offers": [
        {
          "@type": "Offer",
          "price": "{{ itemPrice }}",
          "priceCurrency": "EUR",
          "seller": {
            "@type": "Organization",
            "name": "{{ seller }}"
          },
          "itemCondition": "NewCondition"
        }
      ]
    }

Answer 1

1. Structured data in the JSON-LD implementation, like in your example, has nothing to do with nofollow.

2. nofollow has nothing to do with indexation.

3. If external links are not belonging to you, you have no influation on would Google index them or not.

4. If external links are belonging to you, set them to noindex, and they will be not indexed by Google.

5. In my opinion it doesn't worth to mention in own structured data urls, which aren't belonging to you - they violate the structured data idea and standard and Google will not take any notice about such urls.

6. If you want to try to mix structured data with HTML (nofollow) - use microdata, it is iplementied directly in the body HTML, so you get the possibility to markup your links with nofollow and with microdata simultanously. Whether Google recognizes them because of their external domain nature, is another, not answered, question.

Answer 2

JSON LD data structure has nothing to do with indexing. JSON LD is used for website data structure. Go to Indexing code in GSC.

Indexing can only be written with html script (not JSON script). If you want to write nofollow or dofollow, do it with html code.