10 Illustrations of How Fresh Content May Influence Google Rankings (Updated)

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

[Estimated read time: 11 minutes]

How fresh is this article?

Through patent filings over the years, Google has explored many ways that it might use “freshness” as a ranking signal. Back in 2011, we published a popular Moz Blog post about these “Freshness Factors” for SEO. Following our own advice, this is a brand new update of that article.

In 2003, Google engineers filed a patent named Information retrieval based on historical data that shook the SEO world. The patent not only offered insight into the mind of Google engineers at the time, but also seemingly provided a roadmap for Google's algorithm for years to come.

In his series on the “10 most important search patents of all time,” Bill Slawski's excellent writeup shows how this patent spawned an entire family of Google child patents–the latest from October 2011.

This post doesn't attempt to describe all the ways that Google may determine freshness to rank web pages, but instead focuses on areas we may most likely influence through SEO.

Giant, great big caveat: Keep in mind that while multiple Google patent filings describe these techniques - often in great detail - we have no guarantee how Google uses them in its algorithm. While we can't be 100% certain, evidence suggests that they use at least some, and possibly many, of these techniques to rank search results.

For another take on these factors, I highly recommend reading Justin Briggs' excellent article Methods for Evaluating Freshness.

When “Queries Deserve Freshness”

Former Google Fellow Amit Singhal once explained how “Different searches have different freshness needs.”

The implication is that Google measures all of your documents for freshness, then scores each page according to the type of search query.

Singhal describes the types of keyword searches most likely to require fresh content:

• Recent events or hot topics: “occupy oakland protest” “nba lockout”


• Regularly recurring events: “NFL scores” “dancing with the stars” “exxon earnings”


• Frequent updates: “best slr cameras” “subaru impreza reviews”

Google may determine exactly which queries require fresh content by monitoring the web and their own huge warehouse of data, including:

1. Search volume: Are queries for a particular term spiking (i.e. “Earthquake Los Angeles”)?


2. News and blog coverage: If a number of news organizations start writing about the same subject, it's likely a hot topic.


3. Social media: A spike in mentions of a particular topic may indicate the topic is “trending.”

While some queries need fresh content, other search queries may be better served by older content.

Fresh is often better, but not always. (More on this later.)

Below are ten ways Google may determine the freshness of your content. Images courtesy of my favorite graphic designer, Dawn Shepard.

1. Freshness by inception date

Initially, a web page can be given a “freshness” score based on its inception date, which decays over time. This freshness score may boost a piece of content for certain search queries, but degrades as the content becomes older.

The inception date is often when Google first becomes aware of the document, such as when Googlebot first indexes a document or discovers a link to it.

"For some queries, older documents may be more favorable than newer ones. As a result, it may be beneficial to adjust the score of a document based on the difference (in age) from the average age of the result set."
– All captions from US Patent Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update

2. Amount of change influences freshness: How Much

The age of a webpage or domain isn't the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn't change. In this case, the amount of change on your webpage plays a role.

For example, changing a single sentence won't have as big of a freshness impact as a large change to the main body text.

"Also, a document having a relatively large amount of its content updated over time might be scored differently than a document having a relatively small amount of its content updated over time."

In fact, Google may choose to ignore small changes completely. That's one reason why when I update a link on a page, I typically also update the text surrounding it. This way, Google may be less likely to ignore the change. Consider the following:

"In order to not update every link's freshness from a minor edit of a tiny unrelated part of a document, each updated document may be tested for significant changes (e.g., changes to a large portion of the document or changes to many different portions of the document) and a link's freshness may be updated (or not updated) accordingly."

3. Changes to core content matter more: How important

Changes made in “important” areas of a document will signal freshness differently than changes made in less important content.

Less important content includes:

• JavaScript


• Comments


• Advertisements


• Navigation


• Boilerplate material


• Date/time tags

Conversely, “important” content often means the main body text.

So simply changing out the links in your sidebar, or updating your footer copy, likely won't be considered as a signal of freshness.

"…content deemed to be unimportant if updated/changed, such as Javascript, comments, advertisements, navigational elements, boilerplate material, or date/time tags, may be given relatively little weight or even ignored altogether when determining UA."

This brings up the issue of timestamps on a page. Some webmasters like to update timestamps regularly - sometimes in an attempt to fake freshness - but there exists conflicting evidence on how well this works. Suffice to say, the freshness signals are likely much stronger when you keep the actual page content itself fresh and updated.

4. The rate of document change: How often

Content that changes more often is scored differently than content that only changes every few years.

For example, consider the homepage of the New York Times, which updates every day and has a high degree of change.

"For example, a document whose content is edited often may be scored differently than a document whose content remains static over time. Also, a document having a relatively large amount of its content updated over time might be scored differently than a document having a relatively small amount of its content updated over time."

Google may treat links from these pages differently as well (more on this below.) For example, a fresh “link of the day” from the Yahoo homepage may be assigned less significance than a link that remains more permanently.

5. New page creation

Instead of revising individual pages, fresh websites often add completely new pages over time. (This is the case with most blogs.) Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.

"UA may also be determined as a function of one or more factors, such as the number of 'new' or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time. Another factor might include the ratio of the number of new or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time versus the total number of pages associated with that document."

Some webmasters advocate adding 20–30% new pages to your site every year. Personally, I don't believe this is necessary as long as you send other freshness signals, including keeping your content up-to-date and regularly earning new links.

6. Rate of new link growth signals freshness

Not all freshness signals are restricted to the page itself. Many external signals can also indicate freshness as well, oftentimes with powerful results.

If a webpage sees an increase in its link growth rate, this could indicate a signal of relevance to search engines. For example, if folks start linking to your personal website because you're about to get married, your site could be deemed more relevant and fresh (as far as this current event goes.)

"…a downward trend in the number or rate of new links (e.g., based on a comparison of the number or rate of new links in a recent time period versus an older time period) over time could signal to search engine 125 that a document is stale, in which case search engine 125 may decrease the document's score."

Be warned: an unusual increase in linking activity can also indicate spam or manipulative link building techniques. Search engines are likely to devalue such behavior. Natural link growth over time is usually the best bet.

7. Links from fresh sites pass fresh value

Links from sites that have a high freshness score themselves can raise the freshness score of the sites they link to.

For example, if you obtain a link off an old, static site that hasn't been updated in years, this may not pass the same level of freshness value as a link from a fresh page, i.e. the homepage of Wired. Justin Briggs coined this FreshRank.

"Document S may be considered fresh if n% of the links to S are fresh or if the documents containing forward links to S are considered fresh."

8. Traffic and engagement metrics may signal freshness

When Google presents a list of search results to users, the results the users choose and how much time they spend on each one can be used as an indicator of freshness and relevance.

For example, if users consistently click a search result further down the list, and they spend much more time engaged with that page than the other results, this may mean the result is more fresh and relevant.

"If a document is returned for a certain query and over time, or within a given time window, users spend either more or less time on average on the document given the same or similar query, then this may be used as an indication that the document is fresh or stale, respectively."

You might interpret this to mean that click-through rate is a ranking factor, but that's not necessarily the case. A more nuanced interpretation might say that the increased clicks tell Google there is a hot interest in the topic, and this page - and others like it - happen to match user intent.

For a more detailed explanation of this CTR phenomenon, I highly recommend reading Eric Enge's excellent article about CTR as a ranking factor.

9. Changes in anchor text may devalue links

If the subject of a web page changes dramatically over time, it makes sense that any new anchor text pointing to the page will change as well.

For example, if you buy a domain about racing cars, then change the format to content about baking, over time your new incoming anchor text will shift from cars to cookies.

In this instance, Google might determine that your site has changed so much that the old anchor text is now stale (the opposite of fresh) and devalue those older links entirely.

"The date of appearance/change of the document pointed to by the link may be a good indicator of the freshness of the anchor text based on the theory that good anchor text may go unchanged when a document gets updated if it is still relevant and good."

The lesson here is that if you update a page, don't deviate too much from the original context or you may risk losing equity from your pre-existing links.

10. Older is often better

Google understands the newest result isn't always the best. Consider a search query for “Magna Carta." An older, authoritative result may be best here.

In this case, having a well-aged document may actually help you.

Google's patent suggests they determine the freshness requirement for a query based on the average age of documents returned for the query.

"For some queries, documents with content that has not recently changed may be more favorable than documents with content that has recently changed. As a result, it may be beneficial to adjust the score of a document based on the difference from the average date-of-change of the result set."

A good way to determine this is to simply Google your search term, and gauge the average inception age of the pages returned in the results. If they all appear more than a few years old, a brand-new fresh page may have a hard time competing.

Freshness best practices

The goal here shouldn't be to update your site simply for the sake of updating it and hoping for better ranking. If this is your practice, you'll likely be frustrated with a lack of results.

Instead, your goal should be to update your site in a timely manner that benefits users, with an aim of increasing clicks, user engagement, and fresh links. These are the clearest signals you can pass to Google to show that your site is fresh and deserving of high rankings.

Aside from updating older content, other best practices include:

1. Create new content regularly.


2. When updating, focus on core content, and not unimportant boilerplate material.


3. Keep in mind that small changes may be ignored. If you're going to update a link, you may consider updating all the text around the link.


4. Steady link growth is almost always better than spiky, inconsistent link growth.


5. All other things being equal, links from fresher pages likely pass more value than links from stale pages.


6. Engagement metrics are your friend. Work to increase clicks and user satisfaction.


7. If you change the topic of a page too much, older links to the page may lose value.

Updating older content works amazingly well when you also earn fresh links to the content. A perfect example of this is when Geoff Kenyon updated his Technical Site Audit Checklist post on Moz. You can see the before and after results below:

Be fresh.

Be relevant.

Most important, be useful.

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Predicting Intent: What Unnatural Outbound Link Penalties Could Mean for the Future of SEO

Posted by Angular

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

As SEOs, we often find ourselves facing new changes implemented by search engines that impact how our clients' websites perform in the SERPs. With each change, it's important that we look beyond its immediate impact and think about its future implications so that we can try to answer this question: "If I were Google, why would I do that?"

Recently, Google implemented a series of manual penalties that affected sites deemed to have unnatural outbound links. Webmasters of affected sites received messages like this in Google Search Console:

Webmasters were notified in an email that Google had detected a pattern of "unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links." The manual action itself described the link as being either "unnatural or irrelevant."

The responses from webmasters varied in their usual extreme fashion, with recommendations ranging from "do nothing" to "nofollow every outbound link on your site."

Google's John Mueller posted in product forums that you don't need to nofollow every link on your site, but you should focus on nofollowing links that point to a product, sales, or social media page as the result of an exchange.

Now, on to the fun part of being an SEO: looking at a problem and trying to reverse-engineer Google's intentions to decipher the implications this could have on our industry, clients, and strategy.

The intent of this post is not to decry those opinions that this was specifically focused on bloggers who placed dofollow links on product/business reviews, but to present a few ideas to incite discussion as to the potential big-picture strategy that could be at play here.

A few concepts that influenced my thought process are as follows:

• Penguin has repeatedly missed its "launch date," which indicates that Google engineers don't feel it's accurate enough to release into the wild.

• The growth of negative SEO makes it even more difficult for Google to identify/penalize sites for tactics that are not implemented on their own websites.


• Penguin temporarily impacted link-building markets in a way Google would want. The decline reached its plateau in July 2015, as shown in this graph from Google Trends:
  
  

If I were Google, I would expect webmasters impacted by the unnatural outbound links penalty to respond in one of these ways:

1. Do nothing. The penalty is specifically stated to "discount the trust in links on your site." As a webmaster, do you really care if Google trusts the outbound links on your site or not? What about if the penalty does not impact your traffic, rankings, visibility, etc.? What incentive do you have to take any action? Even if you sell links, if the information is not publicly displayed, this does nothing to harm your link-selling business.


2. Innocent site cleanup effort. A legitimate site that has not exchanged goods for links (or wants to pretend they haven't) would simply go through their site and remove any links that they feel may have triggered the issue and then maybe file a bland reconsideration request stating as much.


3. Guilty site cleanup effort. A site that has participated in link schemes would know exactly which links are the offenders and remove them. Now, depending on the business owner, some might then file a reconsideration request saying, "I'm sorry, so-and-so paid me to do it, and I'll never do it again." Others may simply state, "Yes, we have identified the problem and corrected it."

In scenario No. 1, Google wins because this helps further the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) campaigns around link development. It is suddenly impossible to know if a site's outbound links have value because they may possibly have a penalty preventing them from passing value. So link building not only continues to carry the risk of creating a penalty on your site, but it suddenly becomes more obvious that you could exchange goods/money/services for a link that has no value despite its MozRank or any other external "ranking" metric.

In scenarios No. 2 and No. 3, Google wins because they can monitor the links that have been nofollowed/removed and add potential link scheme violators to training data.

In scenario No. 3, they may be able to procure evidence of sites participating in link schemes through admissions by webmasters who sold the links.

If I were Google, I would really love to have a control group of known sites participating in link schemes to further develop my machine-learned algorithm for detecting link profile manipulation. I would take the unnatural outbound link data from scenario No. 3 above and run those sites as a data set against Penguin to attempt 100% confidence, knowing that all those sites definitely participated in link schemes. Then I would tweak Penguin with this training dataset and issue manual actions against the linked sites.

This wouldn't be the first time SEOs have predicted a Google subtext of leveraging webmasters and their data to help them further develop their algorithms for link penalties. In 2012, the SEO industry was skeptical regarding the use of the disavow tool and whether or not Google was crowdsourcing webmasters for their spam team.

"Clearly there are link schemes that cannot be caught through the standard algorithm. That's one of the reasons why there are manual actions. It's within the realm of possibilities that disavow data can be used to confirm how well they're catching spam, as well as identifying spam they couldn't catch automatically. For example, when web publishers disavow sites that were not caught by the algorithm, this can suggest a new area for quality control to look into." - Roger Montti, Martinibuster.com

What objectives could the unnatural outbound links penalties accomplish?

1. Legit webmasters could become more afraid to sell/place links because they get "penalized."


2. Spammy webmasters could continue selling links from their penalized sites, which would add to the confusion and devaluation of link markets.


3. Webmasters could become afraid to buy/exchange links because they could get scammed by penalized sites and be more likely to be outed by the legitimate sites.


4. The Penguin algorithm could have increased confidence scoring and become ready for real-time implementation.

"There was a time when Google would devalue the PR of a site that was caught selling links. With that signal gone, and Google going after outbound links, it is now more difficult than ever to know whether a link acquired is really of value." -- Russ Jones, Principal Search Scientist at MOZ

Again, if I were Google, the next generation of Penguin would likely heavily weight irrelevantly placed links, and not just commercial keyword-specific anchor text. Testing this first on the sites I think are guilty of providing the links and simply devaluing those links seems much smarter. Of course, at this point, there is no specific evidence to indicate Google's intention behind the unnatural outbound links penalties were intended as a final testing phase for Penguin and to further devalue the manipulated link market. But if I were Google, that's exactly what I would be doing.

"Gone are the days of easily repeatable link building strategies. Acquiring links shouldn't be easy, and Penguin will continue to change the search marketing landscape whether we like it or not. I, for one, welcome our artificially intelligent overlords. Future iterations of the Penguin algorithm will further solidify the “difficulty level” of link acquisition, making spam less popular and forcing businesses toward legitimate marketing strategies." - Tripp Hamilton, Product Manager at Removeem.com

Google's webmaster guidelines show link schemes are interpreted by intent. I wonder what happens if I start nofollowing links from my site for the intent of devaluing a site's rankings? The intent is manipulation. Am I at risk of being considered a participant in link schemes? If I do link building as part of an SEO campaign, am I inherently conducting a link scheme?

So, since I'm an SEO, not Google, I have to ask myself and my colleagues, "What does this do to change or reinforce my SEO efforts?" I immediately think back to a Whiteboard Friday from a few years ago that discusses the Rules of Link Building.

"At its best, good link building is indistinguishable from good marketing." - Cyrus Shepard, former Content Astronaut at Moz

When asked what type of impact SEOs should expect from this, Garret French from Citation Labs shared:

"Clearly this new effort by Google will start to dry up the dofollow sponsored post, sponsored review marketplace. Watch for prices to drop over the next few months and then go back and test reviews with nofollowed links to see which ones actually drive converting traffic! If you can't stomach paying for nofollowed links then it's time to get creative and return to old-fashioned, story-driven blog PR. It doesn't scale well, but it works well for natural links."

In conclusion, as SEOs, we are responsible for predicting the future of our industry. We do not simply act in the present. Google does not wish for its results to be gamed and have departments full of data scientists dedicated to building algorithms to identify and devalue manipulative practices. If you are incapable of legitimately building links, then you must mimic legitimate links in all aspects (or consider a new career).

Takeaways

Most importantly, any links that we try to build must provide value. If a URL links to a landing page that is not contextually relevant to its source page, then this irrelevant link is likely to be flagged and devalued. Remember, Google can do topical analysis, too.

In link cleanup mode or Penguin recovery, we've typically approached unnatural links as being obvious when they have a commercial keyword (e.g. "insurance quotes") because links more naturally occur with the URL, brand, or navigational labels as anchor text. It would also be safe to assume that natural links tend to occur in content about the destination the link offers and that link relevance should be considered.

Finally, we should continue to identify and present clients with methods for naturally building authority by providing value in what they offer and working to build real relationships and brand advocates.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree? Disagree?

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Context is King: A Million Examples of Creative Ad Campaigns Getting it Right

Posted by Daniel_Marks

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

This was one of the first television commercials to ever air:

Talking to the camera on a mic was the obvious way to leverage television: after all, that's how radio commercials worked. Now, advertisers could just put radio commercials on television. What an exciting new advertising medium!

As it turns out, putting radio commercials on television wasn't really the best use of this new medium. Sound familiar? This seems awfully similar to the current practice of turning your television commercial into a YouTube pre-roll ad. However, the difference this time isn't the media format, which is largely similar (YouTube videos are still video, banner ads are still text + image, podcast sponsorships are still voice, etc.) Instead, the difference is how people are consuming the content; in other words, the context.

A television commercial is a relatively static experience: 30 seconds of video placed within a few appropriate time slots, reaching people in their living room (or possibly bedroom). A Facebook newsfeed ad is a little more dynamic: it can be seen anywhere (home, office, bus, etc.), at anytime, by anyone, in almost any format and next to almost any content. The digital age has basically exacerbated the "problem" of context by offering up a thousand different ways for consumers to interact with your marketing.

But, with great problems comes great opportunity - or something like that. So, what are some ways to leverage context in the digital age?

Intent context

Different channels have different user intents. On one end of the funnel are channels like Facebook and Snapchat that are great fillers of the empty space in our lives. This makes them well-suited for top-of-funnel brand advertising because you aren't looking for something specific and are therefore more receptive to brand messaging (though you can certainly use Facebook for direct marketing purposes).

BuzzFeed, for example, has done a great job of tailoring their Snapchat content to the intent of the channel - it's about immediate gratification, not driving off-channel behaviors:

This feels like you're watching your friend's Snapchat story, not professionally produced branded content. However, it's still the early days for Snapchat - all companies, including BuzzFeed, are trying to figure out what kind of content makes sense for their goals.

As for Facebook, there are plenty of examples of doing brand awareness right, but one of the more famous ones is by A1 Steak Sauce. It was both set and promoted (in part) on Facebook:

Critically, the video works with or without sound.

On the other end of the funnel is something like AdWords: great when you know what you're looking for, not so great when you don't. This subway ad for health insurance from Oscar feels pretty out of place when you use the same copy for AdWords:

Getting intent right means that you need to actually experience your ad as a user would. It's not enough to put a bunch of marketers together in a conference room and watch the YouTube ad you created. You need to feel the ad as a user would. This means watching your ad when you're in the living room and just clicked on a friend's YouTube link from Facebook to watch a soccer highlight (or whatever).

Situational context

Situational context (is that redundant?) can be leveraged with a whole range of strategies, but the overarching theme is the same: make users feel like the ad they're seeing is uniquely built for their current situation. It's putting a YouTube star in pre-roll ads on their own channel, or quickly tweeting something off the back of a current event:

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC
- Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

...or digital experiences that are relevant to the sporting event a user is watching:

There are thousands of examples of doing this right:

• Burger King tailors its pre-roll ads to the video you're about to watch


• HubSpot plays off the fact that you just unsubscribed from their email list


• Netflix shows you a "Friends" clip related to the YouTube video you're about to watch


• Coke triggers an app notification while watching a Coke commercial


• YouTube automatically adds links to purchase a movie to fan-uploaded movie scenes


• Shopify reaches you with a simple message just after logging out:

Behavioral context

You might want people on Facebook to watch your video with sound, but the reality is that 85% of Facebook video views are silent. You might want people to watch your brilliant one-minute YouTube ad, but the reality is that 94% of users skip an ad after 5 seconds You need to embrace user behaviors instead of railing against them, like these smart people:

• Wells Fargo creates a Facebook version of their television ad: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/building-video-for-mobile-feed
  
  The important takeaways are making it short, having captions to make it understandable without sound, and putting the brand mention earlier in the video.

• Geico makes an “unskippable” 5 second YouTube ad:
  
  How do you reach people who skip your commercial after 5 seconds? Make the ad 5 seconds long!

Understanding channel behaviors means not using channel features for the sake of channel features while still taking advantage of behaviors that allow for richer ad experiences. It means using the channel yourself, looking up the relevant research, talking to experts, and making informed decisions about how people will actually engage with your creative work.

Location context

A user's location can prompt geographic-specific advertising (for example, Facebook Local Awareness Ads or in-store Snapchat filters). It can feel gimmicky when used needlessly, but can provide a compelling marketing experience when done right.

AirBnB's slogan is "belong anywhere." One of the ways to feel like a local in a new city is to have locals give you a personal tour - which is exactly what AirBnB provides by targeting people on mobile when they're looking for directions:

Or you can just make use of location services in more straightforward ways, like how the Bernie Sanders campaign targeted his core demographics in New York before the important primary by using Snapchat Geofilters.

However, be careful about inferring location from device - only 17% of mobile searches are on the go.

Audience context

Audience targeting is likely the most powerful form of context provided by digital marketing. You can segment your audience in a thousand different ways - from Facebook Lookalikes to Google Customer Match - that a billboard could only dream of. The more you customize your ad copy to the audience you're targeting, the better off you'll be. (There seems to be a running theme here…)

You could directly speak to the audience of your competitors by targeting branded keywords:

Or better yet, target competitor customers that are about to change services:

Great tip: Target the keywords “Cancel [your competitor's service]" w/ PPC ads. @wilreynolds #searchlove <- Brilliant strategy
- Annie Cushing (@AnnieCushing) October 27, 2014

Retargeting is another powerful way to use audience context by changing your copy to reflect the actions a user has taken on your site (more great retargeting examples here):

Then, of course, there are all the obvious ways of leveraging audience, such as adjusting your value proposition, using a slightly different tone, or tweaking the offer you provide.

There's a cliché that the digital age has killed advertising creativity. Forget about clever copy or innovative work, It's all about spreadsheets and algorithms now. This couldn't be further from the truth. The Internet didn't kill advertising creativity - it just raised the bar. Content in all its forms (video ads, blog posts, tweets, etc.) will always be important. It might be harder to buy engaged eyeballs for your 30-second commercial online, but content done right can reach millions of people who are voluntarily consuming it. More importantly, though, the Internet lets you engage with your audience in a thousand innovative ways, providing a revamped arena for marketing creativity: context.

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Using Google Tag Manager to Dynamically Generate Schema/JSON-LD Tags

Posted by serpschris

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

One of the biggest takeaways from SearchFest in Portland earlier this year was the rapidly rising importance of semantic search and structured data - in particular Schema.org. And while implementing Schema used to require a lot of changes to your site's markup, the JSON-LD format has created a great alternative to adding microdata to a page with minimal code.

Check out Mike Arnesen's deck from his SearchFest talk, "Understanding & Facilitating Semantic Search," for a great overview on using structured data.

What was even more exciting was the idea that you could use Google Tag Manager to insert JSON-LD into a page, allowing you to add Schema markup to your site without having to touch the site's code directly (in other words, no back and forth with the IT department).

Trouble is, while it seemed like Tag Manager would let you insert a JSON-LD snippet on the page no problem, it didn't appear to be possible to use other Tag Manager features to dynamically generate that snippet. Tag Manager lets you create variables by extracting content from the page using either CSS selectors or some basic JavaScript. These variables can then be used dynamically in your tags (check out Mike's post on semantic analysis for a good example).

So if we wanted to grab that page URL and pass it dynamically to the JSON-LD snippet, we might have tried something like this:

But that doesn't work. Bummer.

Meaning that if you wanted to use GTM to add the the BlogPosting Schema type to each of your blog posts, you would have to create a different tag and trigger (based on the URL) for each post. Not exactly scalable.

But, with a bit of experimentation, I've figured out a little bit of JavaScript magic that makes it possible to extract data from the existing content on the page and dynamically create a valid JSON-LD snippet.

Dynamically generating JSON-LD

The reason why our first example doesn't work is because Tag Manager replaces each variable with a little piece of JavaScript that calls a function - returning the value of whatever variable is called.

We can see this error in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool:

The error is the result of Tag Manager inserting JavaScript into what should be a JSON tag - this is invalid, and so the tag fails.

However, we can use Tag Manager to insert a JavaScript tag, and have that JavaScript tag insert our JSON-LD tag.

If you're not super familiar with JavaScript, this might look pretty complicated, but it actually works the exact same way as many other tags you're probably already using (like Google Analytics, or Tag Manager itself).

Here, our Schema data is contained within the JavaScript "data" object, which we can dynamically populate with variables from Tag Manager. The snippet then creates a script tag on the page with the right type (application/ld+json), and populates the tag with our data, which we convert to JSON using the JSON.stringify function.

The purpose of this example is simply to demonstrate how the script works (dynamically swapping out the URL for the Organization Schema type wouldn't actually make much sense). So let's see how it could be used in the real world.

Dynamically generating Schema.org tags for blog posts

Start with a valid Schema template

First, build out a complete JSON/LD Schema snippet for a single post based on the schema.org/BlogPosting specification.

Identify the necessary dynamic variables

There are a number of variables that will be the same between articles; for example, the publisher information. Likewise, the main image for each article has a specific size generated by WordPress that will always be the same between posts, so we can keep the height and width variables constant.

In our case, we've identified 7 variables that change between posts that we'll want to populate dynamically:

Create the variables within Google Tag Manager

• Main Entity ID: The page URL.


• Headline: We'll keep this simple and use the page title.


• Date Published and Modified: Our blog is on WordPress, so we already have meta tags for "article:published_time" and "article:modified_time". The modified_time isn't always included (unless the post is modified after publishing), but the Schema specification recommends including it, so we should set dateModified to the published date if it there isn't already a modified date. In some circumstances, we may need to re-format the date - fortunately, in this case, it's already in the ISO 860 format, so we're good.


• Author Name: In some cases we're going to need to extract content from the page. Our blog lists the author and published date in the byline. We'll need to extract the name, but leave out the time stamp, trailing pipe, and spaces.

• Article Image: Our blog has Yoast installed, which has specified image tags for Twitter and Open Graph. Note: I'm using the meta twitter:image instead of the og:image tag value due to a small bug that existed with the open graph image on our blog when I wrote this.


• Article Description: We'll use the meta description.

Here is our insertion script, again, that we'll use in our tag, this time with the properties swapped out for the variables we'll need to create:

I'm leaving out dateModified right now - we'll cover than in a minute.

Extracting meta values

Fortunately, Tag Manager makes extracting values from DOM elements really easy - especially because, as is the case with meta properties, the exact value we need will be in one of the element's attributes. To extract the page title, we can get the value of the