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Structured Data & Social Previews

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Choosing and writing it

• Verify the schema types chosen actually describe the page — Organization, Product, Article, SoftwareApplication, LocalBusiness — rather than whatever the plugin defaulted to.
• Verify JSON-LD is used rather than microdata or RDFa; it is what Google recommends and it is far easier to keep correct.
• Verify structured data is server-rendered or otherwise present for a crawler that does not execute your JavaScript.
• Verify the markup describes content that is actually visible on the page; marking up something a user cannot see is a policy violation, not a shortcut.
• Verify required properties for each type are present, not just the recommended ones.

The markup worth having

• Verify the homepage carries Organization with a logo, a URL, and sameAs links to your real social profiles.
• Verify WebSite markup exists if you want a sitelinks search box.
• Verify BreadcrumbList matches the visible breadcrumb and the URL hierarchy.
• Verify articles and posts carry Article or BlogPosting with author, datePublished and dateModified.
• Verify dateModified changes only when the content actually changed.
• Verify product or pricing pages carry Product and Offer with a real price and currency, and that they stay in sync with the page.
• Verify ratings and reviews are marked up only if they are genuine and visible; fabricated AggregateRating is a manual-action risk.
• Verify FAQPage and HowTo are used only where they apply, and with the awareness that their rich results have been heavily restricted.
• Verify LocalBusiness name, address and phone match exactly what appears elsewhere on the web.
• Verify @id values are stable URLs so entities can be linked rather than duplicated across pages.

Social previews

• Verify og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url and og:type are present on every shareable page.
• Verify og:url is the canonical absolute URL.
• Verify og:image is an absolute URL, at least 1200×630, and under the platform size limits.
• Verify the preview image is not generated per request in a way that times out the scraper.
• Verify twitter:card is set, with summary_large_image where the image is the point.
• Verify the preview actually renders: paste the URL into Slack, iMessage and X, and look.
• Verify Open Graph tags are in the initial HTML — scrapers do not run JavaScript.
• Verify a default preview image exists for pages that do not define their own.

Validation and upkeep

• Validate with the Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator, and fix warnings as well as errors.
• Verify the Search Console enhancement reports are clean, and that new errors are noticed.
• Verify structured data is generated from the same source as the page content, so the two cannot drift.
• Verify a change to the page template cannot silently drop the markup — add it to whatever check runs at build time.