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Schema piece - Article

Describes an Article on a WebPage. May be transformed into a more specific type (such as NewsArticle) if the required conditions are met.

Triggers​

Should be output on all post types which support authorship and have an author.

Required properties​

A valid Article must have the following properties.

  • @type: Article.
  • @id: The site's home URL appended by #/schema/Article/{{ID}}, where {{ID}} is a unique identifier for the article in question.
  • headline: The headline of the article (falling back to the title of the WebPage ).
  • description: A summary of the article (falling back to the page's meta description content).
  • isPartOf: A reference-by-ID to the WebPage node.
  • mainEntityOfPage: A reference-by-ID to the WebPage node.
  • datePublished: The time at which the article was originally published, in ISO 8601 format; e.g., 2015-10-31T16:10:29+00:00.
  • dateModified: The time at which the article was last modified, in ISO 8601 format; e.g., 2015-10-31T16:10:29+00:00.
  • author: A reference-by-ID to the author of the article, in addition to their name property (to better support Pinterest).
  • publisher: A reference-by-ID to the publisher of the article.

Failure scenarios​

If any of the required fields are missing or invalid, the node should not be output.

Optional properties​

The following should be added whenever available and valid:

  • image: An image object (or array of all images in the article content), referenced by ID.
    • Must be at least 696 pixels wide.
    • Must be of the following formats+file extensions: .jpg, .png, .gif ,or .webp.
  • video: An array of all videos in the article content, referenced by ID.
  • comment: An array of references by ID to comment pieces.
  • articleSection: An array of the names of categories which the article belongs to (e.g., ["cats","dogs","cake"]).
  • inLanguage: The language code for the article; e.g., en-GB.
  • speakable: A SpeakableSpecification object which identifies any content elements suitable for spoken results.

Conditional properties​

Optional properties which should only be output when the required criteria are met.

  • copyrightYear: The year from which the article holds copyright status.
  • copyrightHolder: A reference-by-ID to the Organization or Person who holds the copyright.

If there are comments​

  • commentCount: An integer value of the number of comments associated with the article.
  • comment: An array of references-by-ID to the comment pieces associated with the article.

If commenting is allowed/enabled​

  • potentialAction: A CommentAction object with values:
  • name: "Comment".
  • target: The url property of the parent WebPage, appended with #comment.

Examples​

Minimum criteria​

{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@graph": [
        {
            "@type": "Article",
            "@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/Article/abc123",
            "headline": "Example article headline",
            "description": "Example article description",
            "isPartOf": {
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/blog/example-article/"
            },
            "mainEntityOfPage": {
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/blog/example-article/"
            },
            "datePublished": "2019-07-10T08:08:40+00:00",
            "dateModified": "2019-07-10T08:43:03+00:00",
            "author": {
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/Person/abc123"
            },
            "publisher": {
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/Organization/1"
            },
            "image": {
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/uploads/example-image.jpg"
            }
        }
    ]
}

Extended criteria​

{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@graph": [
        {
            "@type": "Article",
            "@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/Article/abc123",
            "headline": "Example article headline",
            "description": "Example article description",
            "isPartOf": {
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/blog/example-article/"
            },
            "mainEntityOfPage": {
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/blog/example-article/"
            },
            "datePublished": "2019-07-10T08:08:40+00:00",
            "dateModified": "2019-07-10T08:43:03+00:00",
            "commentCount": 6,
            "articleSection": ["cats","dogs","cake"],
            "inLanguage": "en-US",
            "author": {
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/Person/abc123"
            },
            "publisher": {
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/Organization/1"
            },
            "image": [
                {
                    "@id": "https://www.example.com/uploads/example-image.jpg"
                },
                {
                    "@id": "https://www.example.com/uploads/example-image-2.jpg"
                }
            ],
            "video": [
                {
                    "@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/VideoObject/abc123"
                },
                {
                    "@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/VideoObject/def456"
                }
            ],
            "potentialAction": [
                {
                    "@type": "CommentAction",
                    "name": "Comment"
                    "target": [ "https://www.example.com/blog/example-article/#comment" ]
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

WordPress API: Change Article Schema output​

To make changes to the Article schema that Yoast SEO outputs, you can use our wpseo_schema_article filter. Here is an example:

add_filter( 'wpseo_schema_article', 'change_article_to_social_posting' );

/**
 * Changes @type of Article Schema data.
 *
 * @param array $data Schema.org Article data array.
 *
 * @return array Schema.org Article data array.
 */
function change_article_to_social_posting( $data ) {
    $data['@type'] = 'SocialMediaPosting';

    return $data;
}

Output Article schema on custom post types​

By default, Yoast SEO doesn't output Article schema on custom post types. The code below changes that:

/**
 * Add 'book' to the list of articles post types, so books get Article schema.
 *
 * @param  mixed $post_types The current list of post types.
 *
 * @return array Array of post types for which Yoast SEO renders Article schema.
 */
function article_schema_for_books( $post_types ) {
	$post_types[] = 'book';
	return $post_types;
}

add_filter( 'wpseo_schema_article_post_types', 'article_schema_for_books' );

Note that for a post type to be able to output Article schema, the post type needs to support having an Author. You can add that simply by adding this, for a given post type book:

add_post_type_support( 'book', 'author' );

This currently does not work for the page post type. We are fixing this.

Add images to your Article Schema​

If you want to add an image to an object programmatically, you can do it as follows. Note that we use the YoastSEO surface to get both the canonical from the meta surface as the helpers surface to access the schema->image functionality.

add_filter( 'wpseo_schema_article', 'example_change_article' );

/**
 * Adds images to Article Schema data.
 *
 * @param array $data Schema.org Article data array.
 *
 * @return array Schema.org Article data array.
 */
function example_change_article( $data ) {
    // This is the attachment ID for our image.
    $attachment_id = 12345;

    // We're going to create a graph piece for our image. Every graph piece always needs a Schema ID, so it can
    // be referenced by other graph pieces, best practice is to base that on the canonical adding an ID that's
    // always going to be unique.
    $schema_id     = YoastSEO()->meta->for_current_page()->canonical . '#/schema/image/' . $attachment_id;                 
    $data['image'] = new WPSEO_Schema_Image( $schema_id );

    return $data;
}

Instead of YoastSEO()->helpers->schema->image->generate_from_attachment_id() you can also use YoastSEO()->helpers->schema->image->generate_from_url() which takes, as you've guessed, a URL as input.

To make more changes to our Schema output, see the Yoast SEO Schema API.