Since Tuesday 4.6, we started to get the “Missing comment field (in comment)” message in Google Search Console. It’s probably nothing critical, so just in case you didn’t already know about it.
And it links to this explanation Markup schema per forum di discussione (DiscussionForumPosting, SocialMediaPosting) | Google Search Central | Documentazione | Google for Developers
I’m wondering if this is some sort of Google Console bug since comments in comments are optional. Here’s the schema: Comment - Schema.org Type.
The schema validator from schema.org is also indicating that our structure is good – 0 warnings and errors: Schema Markup Validator
However Google’s Rich Results is showing a glaring “
Missing field “comment” (optional)”: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results/result?id=mZ6z7ZtXJe0XE-YYnmY96Q
I considered commentCount=0, but I hesitate to modify this when I don’t think this should be the fix. Sorry for the laser mention @rrlevering, do you have any input why optional comments in comments are now showing these warnings as seen in OP?
We really want to recommend comments if there is evidence they exist, because often the comments are sometimes more useful than the OP. Many places say the OP has N comments and then don’t include the comments at all. If the OP is “What should I do in Portugal in September?” the real interesting text to rank/evaluate is the comment, not the question.
Previous to the change, we would already do this for commentCount > 0 and no comment. This change was that we also now complain on (pseudo-markup: interactionStatistic.interactionType["CommentAction"] > 0).
The current markup is a little confusing. What does CommentAction mean there? Does it mean threaded replies that occur later? Looking at the example thread visually, I can’t understand why one middle post has a 1 and another one has a 0.
Ah thanks for this hint. I understand the problem now – it’s because we’ve made it possible to reply to a subsequent post despite everything still being displayed chronologically in our topics.
I’ll likely remove the counter in each post, since it will not prove to be useful – crawled topics have posts that are loaded chronologically so nesting replies would not work here. Our “Reply” button also has a bit of magic going on (a reply to the last post is the same as replying to the topic).
So in your UI it’s more like a quoted/inline reply. We don’t have an action to represent that right now (or even a good data model to represent a threading model separate from a linear display). It’s too bad QuoteAction - Schema.org Type doesn’t have a different semantic meaning (it’s aligned with commercial quotes) because that could be the right word.
The reply counters have been removed here: FIX: Exclude reply count on posts due to required Comment nesting by nattsw · Pull Request #27892 · discourse/discourse · GitHub. The issue in OP should be removed with an update.
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