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It seems that schema.org/Product is a bit limited when it comes to pushing various attributes such as modified time. I see that schema.org/CreativeWork has an about facet that looks for a Thing (such as Product). Would it be an acceptable use case to nest Product inside the CreativeWork via about? Would the various graphs/clients/etc understand this? Has anyone attempted this technique or could share experiences?

Sample of this nesting using JSON-LD (you can validate it here):

<script type="application/ld+json"> {
"@context" : "http://schema.org",
"@type" : "CreativeWork",
"datePublished" : "2014-05-15 12:41:39",
"dateModified" : "2015-01-15 10:45:18",
"creator" : {
    "@type" : "Organization",
    "name" : "A Huge Corporation"
},
"about" : {
    "@type" : "Product",
    "name" : "Pure Gold Widget",
    "image" : "http://example.com/product.jpg",
    "description" : "Various paragraphs of words",
    "model" : "PRD-010101",
    "productID" : "987747",
    "brand" : "A Rando Manufacturer",
    "aggregateRating" : {
        "@type" : "AggregateRating",
        "itemReviewed" : "Pure Gold Widget",
        "ratingValue" : "5",
        "ratingCount" : "8",
        "reviewCount" : "8"
    },
    "offers" : {
        "@type" : "Offer",
        "price" : "500",
        "priceCurrency" : "USD",
        "availability" : "http://schema.org/InStock",
        "seller" : "A Huge Corporation"
    }
}}
</script>

Bonus: I included an example of nesting organization within that too (albeit just a name field in this snippet). I am also unsure how nesting organization like this would make "the internets" react.

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  • What exactly is the "modified time" about? Is it the time when the page (which is about a specific product, right?) was last modified? – unor Mar 5 '15 at 23:44
  • @unor Correct, about a specific product, the time it was created and last time modified. There was a SaaS we used a while back...google always posted the date in the SERP for products (similar to how articles do it). It was nice since customers would see a degree of "freshness". I think they got their date ability from RSS, but i [hope] this would offer similar datapoint. Figured we could push some other CreativeWork flags as well with this nest style snippet, assuming it works as it seems. PS: I was wondering why schema.org is a syn for microdata tag...doesnt make much sense to me. – dhaupin Mar 6 '15 at 14:41
  • Hmm additional quick note about display of nested things in GWT structured data report: "The Structured Data page lists only the top-level entities discovered on a page. For example, if your page contains a schema.org/Event that in turn contains a schema.org/Place, only the Event item will be counted." This quote is found here: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2650907?hl=en So i guess that means that if this were a "go" then GWT [currently] wouldnt show products since they would be nested. – dhaupin Mar 6 '15 at 16:09
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Having something like CreativeWork → about → Product seems to be appropriate: it’s a creative work whose "subject matter" is a product. However, you can be more specific:

ItemPage inherits from CreativeWork:

A page devoted to a single item, such as a particular product or hotel.

So you might want to use ItemPage → about → Product

Probably a better choice than about would be a "main entity" property, which gets discussed currently.

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  • After playing some with your answer i think its more valid than my angle. I don't know for sure if/how it passes into SERPs yet, but for now i will mark this as accepted. Thanks – dhaupin Mar 19 '15 at 15:16

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