Discoverability on emsenn.net

JSON-LD

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is a method of encoding structured data using JSON syntax. It allows web pages to embed machine-readable descriptions of their content — what kind of thing a page describes, who created it, when it was published — alongside the human-readable HTML.

How it works

A JSON-LD block is placed inside a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag in the page’s <head> or <body>. It contains a JSON object with a @context (typically https://schema.org) and a @type declaring what kind of thing is being described.

robots.txt

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

robots.txt is a plain-text file placed at the root of a website (e.g., https://example.com/robots.txt) that tells web crawlers which parts of the site they may or may not access. It follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol, first proposed by Martijn Koster in 1994 and codified as an internet standard in RFC 9309 (2022).

How it works

A robots.txt file consists of one or more records, each specifying a user-agent (the crawler’s identifier) and a set of Allow and Disallow directives. Crawlers are expected to fetch this file before crawling any other page and to respect its directives, though compliance is voluntary — robots.txt is a convention, not an access control mechanism.

Structured data

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Structured data is machine-readable information embedded in a web page that describes the page’s content in a standardized vocabulary. Where HTML presents content for humans, structured data presents it for machines — search engines, AI agents, knowledge graph crawlers, and other automated systems.

Forms

Three encoding formats are widely used:

JSON-LD — a JSON block in the page’s <script> tag. Recommended by Google. Used by emsenn.net.
Microdata — HTML attributes (itemscope, itemprop) inline with content.
RDFa — RDF attributes embedded in HTML tags.

All three formats use the same underlying vocabulary, most commonly Schema.org.