Site using links in Schema?

[HoosierBuff]

Hi all,

I think i have seen this once before. I have a client that has built a number of specialty and location pages, but, when you come to the site, they aren't linked from the home page, or main navigation. . . . .except, when I ran screaming frog it found a bunch of links to them.

I viewed the source of the home page, and I found this schema:

To be sure, the only places these links are is in the schema, not on the site.

So, what the hell is this? This seems like a spammy "use the clear text to add keywords" sort of a thing, so I'm going to recommend the client remove it, but really I don't know what it even is. Has anyone seen this before?

 

[johnlavapie_SEO]

This is a pretty big guess. But, I think the URL part was not implemented well. It is obvious they are trying to apply a SiteNavigationElement schema (which I don't think Google uses for any search feature).

This is comparable to the one I found: Schema SiteNavigationElement as JSON-LD Structured Data

I assume they were trying to do the URL part as:

],
"url": [
"/bio-hazard-clean-up",
"/car-bio-hazard-clean-up",
"/suicide-bio-clean-up",
]

But I could be wrong. I am not a Schema expert by any means. I don't think it will make a difference in removing and keeping it. But if you do keep it, maybe change the URL portion to the actual URL like the link I gave above.

 

[Rich Owings]

I agree; it looks spammy (although it may be accidental). Schema should reflect what is on the page

 

[HoosierBuff]

Thanks- yeah, seems like a cheap way to get the links on the page without actually getting them on the page.

Going to delete it.

 

[localseosecrets]

The fact that a competitor is using Schema in that way, doesn't mean it helps with something.

First of all that Schema is wrong.
Second, Schema is to correlate entities, not to "send" juice or "build" backlinks between pages.

"Structured markup allows search engines, users and systems to understand the content, context and relationship of entities."

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