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JSON-LD explained for personal websites

hawksley.dev

21–30 of 94 posts

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#22
post #19

> It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking. This is fighting the last war, to stretch a metaphor. As far as I and my WWW site are concerned, Google has nowadays switched to giving people lengthy LLM-generated versions of my stuff, with errors, above pointing people to my actual stuff. 'Brea…

Yep. For years we loaded up web sites with "microdata" tags and attributes in the hope that they would drive traffic.

All it did was train Google's AI so people would never leave Google.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#23
post #19

> It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking. This is fighting the last war, to stretch a metaphor. As far as I and my WWW site are concerned, Google has nowadays switched to giving people lengthy LLM-generated versions of my stuff, with errors, above pointing people to my actual stuff. 'Brea…

Yep. For years we loaded up web sites with "microdata" tags and attributes in the hope that they would drive traffic. All it did was train Google's AI so people would never leave Google.

Considering that LLMs will give increasingly better sources for their stuff you still want to make it easy for Google to index your stuff.

Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#24

I would encourage people who have the pragmatic bent to read about JSON-LD from the Google documentation for web sites; https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu... You’ll also notice that a lot of the information is relevant to only a small subset of sites. Rotten Tomatoes can publish the critic rating for movies using JSON-LD, but that’s not relevant for me (even if I write a review for a movie).…

But duplicating data will increase water expenditure. /s

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For years we loaded up web sites with "microdata" tags and attributes in the hope that they would drive traffic. All it did was train Google's AI so people would never leave Google.

Considering that LLMs will give increasingly better sources for their stuff you still want to make it easy for Google to index your stuff. Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

> Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

Ah, what a glorious fate to aspire to.

Most people I know who have maintained blogs do so to build their personal brand, normally because they make a living through writing or consulting. Gently influencing the pre-tuning weights of future models is just providing unpaid labor to hyperscalers.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#26
post #25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that LLMs will give increasingly better sources for their stuff you still want to make it easy for Google to index your stuff. Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

> Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs Ah, what a glorious fate to aspire to. Most people I know who have maintained blogs do so to build their personal brand, normally because they make a living through writing or consulting. Gently influencing the pre-tuning weights of future models is just providing unpaid labor to hyperscalers.

I remember reading somewhere that you can influence Gemini search

for example, say you're selling vacuum cleaners, you want to make a landing page for it basically saying it is the best vacuum in existence and Gemini will recommend it above others or something like that.

LE: so if you're consulting for Elixir or whatever, maybe it can help to make a "hidden" page only for LLM search where you basically lie about yourself making yourself to be the utmost Elixir expert on the planet

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#27
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For years we loaded up web sites with "microdata" tags and attributes in the hope that they would drive traffic. All it did was train Google's AI so people would never leave Google.

Considering that LLMs will give increasingly better sources for their stuff you still want to make it easy for Google to index your stuff. Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

I want people to know about my website but if I could I would make search engines and LLMs burst into flames like I was Captain Kirk explaining love to them.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#28
post #21

Do these attributes actually help with search engine visibility or do they just make it easier for search engines to keep users from leaving the search page? Honest question here.

If you have a business site, the JSON-LD can be used to feed data to maps platforms. Address, hours, phone, menus.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#29
post #27
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that LLMs will give increasingly better sources for their stuff you still want to make it easy for Google to index your stuff. Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

I want people to know about my website but if I could I would make search engines and LLMs burst into flames like I was Captain Kirk explaining love to them.

Yes, of course you want people to know about your website. Just saying if your website is regarded as useful/original enough by Google to cite as a source.. people will visit your website to check sources. Might be a small amount of people but still.

At this point complaining about the current/future state of search is just gonna make you into a grumpy old man. As always, accept the situation since you can not do anything to change it... and adapt

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#30
post #26
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs Ah, what a glorious fate to aspire to. Most people I know who have maintained blogs do so to build their personal brand, normally because they make a living through writing or consulting. Gently influencing the pre-tuning weights of future models is just providing unpaid labor to hyperscalers.

I remember reading somewhere that you can influence Gemini search for example, say you're selling vacuum cleaners, you want to make a landing page for it basically saying it is the best vacuum in existence and Gemini will recommend it above others or something like that. LE: so if you're consulting for Elixir or whatever, maybe it can help to make a "hidden" page only for LLM search where you basically lie about your…

It's somewhat unfortunate that, at least in my experience, its rather that non-technical people try to implement with a LLM of their choice these days. They don't look for experts or consulting, because that costs more than $20, or $200.

Whether you show up in an LLM's search for "expert in near " has any measurable impact is uncertain, but I wouldn't want that to be my source of traffic.

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