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I want to apply structured data to my website and I'm trying to decide which Schema.org type I should use for an in-depth guides on particular topics.

For example:

  • An in-depth guide on how to find accommodation in a particular country
  • An in-depth guide on taxes for a particular country
  • An in-depth guide on how to find a job for a specific role

The guides tend to be long, often 2000 words plus in the case of the tax ones.

The two main options would seem to be leaving it with the default WebPage and using the default tags passed down from CreativeWork or using the Article type.

I was leaning towards Article but schema.org defines it as:

An article, such as a news article or piece of investigative report. Newspapers and magazines have articles of many different types and this is intended to cover them all.

It's definitely not a news article or an investigative report.

What are peoples opinions? Would you expect the Article type to cover in-depth guides?

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WebPage vs. Article

Article would contain data about the actual (main) content, while WebPage would contain data about the whole page and everything on it (e.g., the site navigation/footer etc.).

So it’s not necessarily either-or; it’s not uncommon to use both:

<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage">
  <article itemprop="mainEntity" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
  </article>
</body>

If you want to use only one type, I’d go with Article. It’s about the content, not the medium which transports it.

Is Article appropriate?

Yes.

"news article or piece of investigative report": these are only examples. Have a look at Article’s sub-types:

So you can see that it’s for way more than just newspaper-related articles.

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  • Thanks very much Unor, I'll go with article! I'd seen the sub-types but I'd not considered that they fell outside of news articles and invetigative reports only that they didn't quite fit what I needed.
    – Dominic Woodman
    Commented Jun 17, 2014 at 12:51

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