Schema in HTML: in meta, or with JSON-lD, and in content

Question

This is for a Magazine website. Each page belongs to the magazine so we have the overall html level schema as type Organization. However, we are now beginning to question if this is sensible.

Magazine articles or sections of articles are not Organization.

Questions:

1. Each article page, we can make the overall HTML scope Article. The producer itemprop may be the magazine name. However, in this case if we had the meta tags and the JSON-LD, then do we still need itemprops inside the body content? Or is that considered duplicate?
2. Each article category page, we can make the overall HTML scope CreativeWork, and then inside the body each listing of article (in UL/LI) can be the Article. This does make sense because clicking on that article's link will anyway bring up the article page, which would have the same structure as described in #1 above. Is this correct? If so, what would the JSON-LD of this category page contain, will it be a large JSON or all the articles, or should we leave that be?
3. Home page: is that a CreativeWork too then?

Broadly, the confusion is which of these we should have. All or some: meta tags, and/or JSON-LD, and/or correct attributes inside the body of the HTML?

Appreciate any pointers!

Answer 1

If you can control it, don’t use multiple syntaxes. Choose one syntax (JSON-LD or Microdata or RDFa; see a comparison) and stick with it.

If you use a syntax that makes use of HTML attributes (i.e., Microdata or RDFa), I would recommend not to care about the HTML structure at first. For the structured data, it doesn’t matter whether something is specified on, say, the html element, the body element, or a div element. First think about the data you want to convey, and only then think about how to express it with the syntax.

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From what you describe, you have a WebSite with

• a WebPage for the homepage,
• an ItemPage for each article page, and
• a CollectionPage for each category page.

The primary item of each page can be specified with the mainEntity property:

• Article for the ItemPage, and
• ItemList of Articles for the CollectionPage.

The Organization can be referenced from each page and from each article, e.g., via author, publisher etc.

Answer 2

I allow myself to give an answer focused on Google guides for structured data. The guidelines Follow the structured data guidelines specify the following:

Important: Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results, even if your page is marked up correctly according to the Structured Data Testing Tool. Here are some common reasons why:

...The structured data is not representative of the main content of the page, or is potentially misleading.

Further, they repeat the same in section Relevance:

Your structured data should be a true representation of the page content.

Thus, if the main content of your web page is an organization, it may be useful to use the top-level type such as Organization. However, if you scroll down the Schema specification for this type, you will see the list of More specific Types:

Airline

Consortium

Corporation

EducationalOrganization

FundingScheme

GovernmentOrganization

LibrarySystem

LocalBusiness

MedicalOrganization

NGO

NewsMediaOrganization

PerformingGroup

Project

SportsOrganization

WorkersUnion

Some of these types in turn also have the list of subtypes. Returning to this Google guide, we can find the following recommendation:

Specificity

Try to use the most specific applicable type and property names defined by schema.org for your markup. Follow all additional guidelines given in the documentation for your specific rich result type.

It may be useful to conduct research among these top-level types and select the most appropriate type one to data representing your business.

This will increase the relevance of your website entities and the organic traffic to your website. For example, if we consider the type LocalBusiness users are unlikely to search the web for something similar to a “local business near to me”. Most likely, they will look for something similar to "a restaurant of Moorish cuisine near to me" or "an auto repair for Volvo XC90 cars". In the SERP for these requests, websites with markup for the type Restaurant and/or AutoRepair.