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I would like to make use of Wikidata for SEO, particularly in helping a page leverage on schema org and linked data.

Say my web page is talking about 4 entities, like:

'A' -> 'B' 

'B' -> 'C' 

'B' -> 'D'

'D' -> 'A' 

I can map A, B, C, D topics with the corresponding ones in Wikidata - and fetch the properties described in Wikidata.

I want to:

  1. make use of Wikidata ID and URI properties to describe an entity and its properties with schema.org or semantic markup

  2. if possible, describe the relationships that A, B, C, D has, to leverage linked data structure.

I describe the process I want to achieve with an example.

Example.

Suppose an article mentions "Success" as one of those A, B, C, D entities.

I fetch the entity: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7632586

From there, I get the corresponding topic on Quora:

Ref. https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#sameAs-def says sameAs should only be used for linking individuals, but Ref. https://schema.org/sameAs suggests I could use https://schema.org/sameAs also for describing a Thing (Success is a Thing).

  1. The second point: which Wikidata ID and properties can be interpreted by schema.org and SEO ?

I wonder if I can use directly 'https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7632586' as per 'Success', or should I add references to human readable URI, like: 'https://www.quora.com/topic/Success'.

As an example, should I write something like this ?

<div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Thing">
    <span itemprop="name">Success</span><br>
    <link itemprop="url" href="http://www.example.com/myPage/">

    // which markup to say 'Success' is the same as Quora topic, since 'sameAs' shoudl be used for people?

    <link itemprop="sameAs" href="https://www.quora.com/topic/Success">

   // should I add the Wikidata Entity itself ?
   <link itemprop="sameAs" href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7632586">
 </div>
  1. The third point: How could I replicate custom structures like : 'A' -> 'B' -> 'C' and appropriately describe the links 'A', 'B', 'C' entities have with a semantic markup ?

I want to accurately describe relationships between entities present in my page, but avoid the opposite result: confusion for a search engine.

In my article I could have 'people' talking about 'success'; and according to this article, 'success' is linked to the Thing 'performance' and the Thing 'wealth' - I want to reflect the graph in linked data.

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    Your question makes sense in a Linked Data context (it might be too broad, though), but as far as SEO is concerned, there is no evidence that the use of Wikidata identifiers affects search engines. Does your question still stand even if there is no SEO benefit? If yes, I would suggest to edit the question to remove the SEO references.
    – unor
    Jan 31, 2019 at 11:43
  • The only SEO benefit to using schema is in cases where Google uses it give rich snippets. Schema doesn't help with rankings. There is no point to trying to find some random schema to apply for SEO. Jan 31, 2019 at 12:30
  • Stephan and Unor, thank you - yes my question still stand I remove SEO. I wrote SEO assuming linked data facilitate to find related information to queries, therefore functional to a query optimisation, not necessarily ranking of the site. My understanding is that structuring semantic data is functional to help user make a query, and a search engine could locate information snippet that is relevant. In my example, semantic data is a semantic description of the graph between the entities 'A, B, C, D'. Please feel free to comment if my understanding of SEO and linked data is not precise.
    – user305883
    Jan 31, 2019 at 14:02
  • I do not believe that Google uses semantic markup for relevancy. I just haven't seen any evidence for it. However, Google rarely explains how things actually work, so it is very hard to know for sure. Jan 31, 2019 at 14:29
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    @nikant25 discussion in the link: So in the end, we will certainly not move from emptying values on "exact match" but would rather them heavily populated with other Linked Data sets. . Mapping an arbitrary entity in web page to Wikidata is the first part of the problem, but I haven't seen a neat example how use sampleAs and/or exactMatch. The other part is mapping the relations between two entities. Do you feel proposing an answer to my question, showing an example with the mockup entities linked (->) as such: people -> success -> wealth, and people-> performance ?
    – user305883
    Feb 2, 2019 at 11:07

1 Answer 1

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For an article about the concept of "success", you could use something like this, using only Schema.org:

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">

  <div itemprop="about" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Intangible">
    <meta itemprop="name" content="Success" />
  </div>

</article>

To allow consumers to understand what your Intangible means, you could provide URI references in the hope that they recognize this URI, or that they can find more data about it there in case it can be used to retrieve a web document.

Here we have to differentiate between URIs that represent the concept itself, and URIs that represent a document about the concept.

Schema.org’s property sameAs property can be used for the latter case (note that, confusingly, it’s not equivalent to OWL’s property of the same name).

<div itemprop="about" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Intangible">
  <meta itemprop="name" content="Success" />
  <link itemprop="sameAs" href="https://www.quora.com/topic/Success" />
  <link itemprop="sameAs" href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7632586" />
</div>

Microdata’s itemid attribute can be used for the former case (referencing a URI that represents the concept itself).

<div itemprop="about" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Intangible" itemid="https://my-ontology.example.com/instances/success">

In case of the Wikidata URI: it also has a URI that represents the concept (it’s linked in the sidebar, and redirects to the URI representing the page): http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7632586. However, this is a class/type (see Wikidata’s help about instance vs. class), so you could use it with Schema.org’s additionalType property:

<div itemprop="about" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Intangible">
  <meta itemprop="name" content="Success" />
  <link itemprop="sameAs"          href="https://www.quora.com/topic/Success" />
  <link itemprop="sameAs"          href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7632586" />
  <link itemprop="additionalType"  href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7632586" />
</div>

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