Does the schema: NewsArticle has effect on position from the page over time?
I noticed that some of my pages are going down in the rankings. The only explanation I have (at this time) is that it could be the wrong schema for this article.
anyone some ideas?
Hi Patrick, how are you doing? Yes, some problems in NewsArticle schema markup can cause problems in news websites or your visibility on Google Discover. A possible structured data error is not always related to the syntax of the markup, but rather to its attributes: image sizing, for example.
But when it comes to a news site, there are other aspects that can affect its visibility. This ranges from information on the date and time of publication of articles (which has to do with structured data markup), to other more qualitative items.
Perhaps if you could send us more information, we could help you better.
What kind of organic traffic did you lose? Google News, News Tab, TOP Stories or Discover? In some of those NewsArticle is mandatory, so if your schema is wrong, you should syntattically be thrown out.
I hope my response is met with thoughtful responses, rather than flaming, but I have users every day disagreeing with the prevailing answers in this thread. About and Mentions Schema - in my opinion, and with increasing corroborating evidence, helps to CLARIFY the content. This gives it context, which will make it more prominent for some search queries and less prominent for others. So - bad schema will confuse any quality algorithm that is trying to work out the page in context. Or - as we explain it in our Linkedin feed:
Schema alone is unlikely to be the sole cause (whether we're looking at a decrease or increase in ranking), but it will have some influence - as the other comments have discussed.
My wider lense on this situaiton will be to look at where you're seeing the decrease and what else is happening in the SERPs.
Has the intent of the keywords changed, meaning NewsArticle and your content is now less aligned to intent? I suppose a broader question here is whether there is a theme in the type of keyword you have declined for vs those that haven't altered.
What structured data are the other pages using?
Who has overtaken you in the SERP and what have the done to their content and their site recently?
As already said, structured data themselves do not affect rankings... directly.
They are meant to (literally) structure the unstructed hence to help bots better understanding the meaning of a content (of any type and format) and, if properties like "sameAs" are used and the "id" are correctly related (i.e.: id article is part of id website, to make a simple example), to understand the relations between the content and other pages/entities of the website and of the knowledge graph in general.
As a consequence of better understanding the meaning of the content (parsing), then Google indexes it better. And if it indexes it better, and if all the other things that make a web document relevant for a set of targeted queries are correct and the website itself doesn't have tech issues that dismantle all the efforts content-side, then the content will have more possibilities to be presented in the search results (rankings and SERPs painting), also with practical visual benefits (rich results, which are a byproduct of structured data, not the main reason for implementing them).
Google states that structured data has no ranking influence. However, helping Google know what your pages are about may influence how they understand your pages and what they rank for. Indicating your content is a news article may change how Google categorises you.
Hello! Markup does not affect ranking, but it can affect traffic and traffic source.
Well schema itself has no impact on the ranking. Instead recently Google is more focused around the content quality. So check your content for quality that will give an answer to this decline.