Schema.org introduced structured data for Questions and Answers back in 2014.
This page suggests the emphasis in the question documentation means you can use it anywhere, not just on Q&A sites or FAQs.
But that got me wondering: Does that actually work?
If you just pop the Q&A structured data wherever you want, will the question and answer actually get picked up and used by Google (or Alexa, or Siri)?
Can one person use this to affect online reality in this willy-nilly way?
Let’s find out.
The paragraph below is created using (more or less) valid structured data for a question and answer that has likely never been asked or answered anywhere else:
What is the sound of a green lobster’s dream?
The sound of a green lobster's dream is a phrase created by Brian Chernicky in November of 2018 to refer a combination of words so unique such that the resulting phrase has likely never been used previously in the entire history of mankind. The question is an homage to Noam Chomsky's sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, used in his 1955 thesis "Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory".
So that code’s not perfect, but it should do the trick.
Using Google Search Console, I’ve manually fetched this page as Google and requested indexing.
Now we can sit back and:
- Verify the structured data on this page is correct. (It is, save for it wanting a mainEntity field and a bunch of recommended values I think I don’t really need to add at this point.)
- Check with Google to see if it wants to display the the answer to the exact question at any point in the future.
T.H.I.N.K. Post Eval:
True
Helpful
Inspiring
Necessary
Kind
