To ensure that analytics, targeting, and recommendations are accurate. The Composer 1X Crawler crawls the HTML that makes up your page, parsing the relevant content from the code and semantically analyzing the relevant portions to build models specific to your page. There are two types of data that the crawler pulls from your page:
Unstructured data: Natural language text on your page. This includes written words in an article, but also dates, numbers, and information on the page. This data is extracted, parsed, and analyzed to provide better segments. This data is typically found within the <title> and <body> sections of the page.
Structured data: Structured data in this context refers to text that is mapped to predefined values, creating "key:value" pair. The Composer 1X crawler normally collects structured data from the <meta> tags in an HTML document.
More information about Document parsing is available under this link.
Recommendations
We recommend the following tags be updated so that Composer 1X can offer you precise segmenting and more accurate on-site recommendations.
Article Authorship
The names of the authors of the document, e.g., the journalists that wrote the news story, can be captured and included in the content profiles by adding relevant meta tags. With that said, you might not need to add anything custom - as long as you use one of these industry standards metadata markups The supported options are, in order of priority:
<meta property="cXenseParse:author" content="John Smith"/>
<meta property="og:article:author" content="John Smith"/>
<meta property="article:author" content="John Smith"/>
<meta property="og:book:author" content="John Smith"/>
<meta property="book:author" content="John Smith"/>
<meta name="author" content="John Smith"/>
<meta name="dc.creator" content="John Smith"/>
<meta name="article.author" content="John Smith"/>
As an alternative to meta tags, subsets of the hAtom microformat (used by the hNews microformat) and the HTML5 rel tag related to article authorship are supported.
<p>This article was written by <span class="vcard author"><span class="fn">John Smith</span></span>.</p>
<p>This article was written by <a rel="author" href="/">John Smith</a>.</p>
Finally, selected Google+ links are also interpreted to indicate article authorship.
<p>This article was written by <a href="https://plus.google.com/12345678?rel=author">John Smith</a>.</p>
The "author" value is limited to 50 characters.
You could declare multiple authors (if applicable) within a single tag by using "data-separator" attribute. Example:
Dominant Image
The Dominant Image or Hero Image of a page is extracted from the page, uploaded to our CDN, and then used by Piano Content when displaying recommendations.
If the dominant image of a page is known, we recommend marking up the page with the open graph og:image field. This will then be used as the dominant image. It is also possible to override og:image using cXenseParse:image.
<meta property="cXenseParse:image" content="http://www.foo.com/images/onion195x71.png"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.foo.com/images/onion195x71.png"/>
Custom Markup
You can supply arbitrary (key, value) pairs through <meta> tags with names having the cXenseParse: prefix, including the colon. The prefix gets stripped away and does not end up as part of the profile element keys. For example, to have the (key, value) pairs (xyz-fruit, orange), (xyz-fruit, apple) and (xyz-climate, tropical) as elements in the content profile, you can use the following HTML markup:
<meta name="cXenseParse:xyz-fruit" content="orange"/>
<meta name="cXenseParse:xyz-fruit" content="apple"/>
<meta name="cXenseParse:xyz-climate" content="tropical"/>
The special data-separator property can be used to split content based on the provided separator character. The markup above can be written like this:
<meta name="cXenseParse:xyz-fruit" content="orange,apple" data-separator=","/>
<meta name="cXenseParse:xyz-climate" content="tropical"/>
The data types number, time, and geopoint (as semicolon pair of latitude/longitude) are supported.
<meta name="cXenseParse:number:xyz-temperature" content="30.1"/>
<meta name="cXenseParse:time:xyz-updated" content="2018-01-01T00:00:00Z"/>
<meta name="cXenseParse:geopoint:xyz-location" content="21.29;-157.72"/>
Keys defined via this markup mechanism (and not explicitly mentioned in this documentation) must be prefixed with an assigned customer prefix, so that their visibility across Piano customers can become limited and causes less confusion. Prefixing with a different string than the assigned prefix causes a risk of inability to retrieve the data in the future.
The xyz shown in the examples is a placeholder for your Customer Prefix. Please contact your Account representative or Piano support for more details.
The values in the custom markup content should have a maximum length of 100 characters.
Special exceptions might apply for the cXenseParse:rescs: prefix. See, e.g., here for more information.
Page Class
Based on properties like URL structure and internal HTML document, a typical page may be defined as article or frontpage. This labeling will have consequences for further processing stages and utilization of the page. For Piano Content, pages classified as frontpage are not recommended. The custom markup tags cXenseParse can be used to a page as either an article or a frontpage. This can be achieved with the <meta> tag described below. Note that no customer prefix is used in this case.
<meta name="cXenseParse:pageclass" content="article"/>
<meta name="cXenseParse:pageclass" content="frontpage"/>
In cases where there is no cXenseParse:pageclass meta tags, and our classification algorithm is not sure if the page is a front-page or an article, specifying the Open Graph type "article" will result in a pageclass of "article".
<meta property="og:type" content="article"/>
Publication Date
The publishing date of a document is a piece of metadata of particular importance for many applications. We recommend explicitly specifying the publishing date and time to ensure that it is correct, especially when using Content to increase the quality of recommendations.
Examples of meta tags to specify publishing date (in prioritized order) are given below. Dates are best specified using yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ (ISO 8601 4.3.2a complete representation of date and time using calendar dates in extended format), to avoid ambiguity.
<meta name="cXenseParse:publishtime" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
<meta name="cXenseParse:recs:publishtime" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
After cXenseParse there is an option for Piano customers in the tp notation. The other option's order is as follows:
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
<meta name="date" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
<meta name="dc.date" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
<meta name="dc.date.created" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
<meta name="dc.terms.issued" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
<meta name="pub_date" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
<meta name="article.published" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
<meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
<meta itemprop="og:article:published_time" content="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z"/>
As an alternative to meta tags, the HTML5 <time> element combined with the hAtom microformat related to specifying publishing dates is supported.
<p>This article was published on <time class="published" datetime="2012-03-01T13:00:00Z">March 1st, 2012</time>.</p>
If no explicit markup indicating publishing dates is present, a best-effort extraction heuristic is applied to the unstructured article body as a last resort.
Extracted publishing dates do not end up in the content profiles but are made available for use by Piano Content and Search.
Modified Date
The Modified Date pulls the latest date a page was modified.
The modified date of a document is extracted from article:modified_time.
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2008-05-05T06:51:49.000Z"/>
If the article has been modified after the last crawling and contains the meta property modified_time (for more information, see Event data), then it will be recrawled as soon as possible.
Optimization Services
Piano Content Recommendations and the Composer 1X crawler are largely customizable. Here we have offered 6 recommended meta tags that you should update so that the Composer 1X crawler can offer your readers specialized results. If you have questions about a tag on this page or want to discuss customizing the crawling experience for your application, reach out to your Account Manager about optimization services.