Title: Markup for linked Schema.org articleSection(s)
Tags: html;schema.org;microdata
Question: I'm trying to mark up article sections (```articleSection```) on my blog listing page. Each article section also has a link to go to that section.

Which of these syntaxes, if any, is correct as they produce different results in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool:



```<a href="#"&gt;<span itemprop='articleSection'&gt;section name 1</span&gt;</a&gt;
```

Testing Tool result: ```articleSection: section name 1```

```<span itemprop='articleSection'&gt;<a href="#"&gt;section name 2</a&gt;</span&gt;
```

Testing Tool result: ```articleSection: section name 2```

```<a href="#" itemprop='articleSection'&gt;section name 3</a&gt;
```

Testing Tool result: ```articleSection: http://www.example.com/pagelocation/#```

Perhaps this matters, perhaps it doesn't.

Does having a link inside the ```articleSection``` property help? ```articleSection``` looks for 'text' not URL.

GoldStarBonus: Is there any way/advantage to associate a link to the articleSection name? If not, that's fine for now.


Here is the accepted answer: The ```articleSection``` property expects Text as value. 

In Microdata, you can give a text value by not using an element that would specify an URL (like ```a```, ```area```, ```link```, ```video``` etc.) or a datetime (```time```).

So don’t use ```a```. ```span``` is fine, unless there is a more appropriate element defined in HTML5.

As far as Microdata and Schema.org are concerned, there is no difference between these:


```<a href="#"&gt;<span itemprop="articleSection"&gt;…</span&gt;</a&gt;```
```<span itemprop="articleSection"&gt;<a href="#"&gt;…</a&gt;</span&gt;```


As Schema.org does not define a type for an article section (e.g., ```ArticleSection```), you can’t specify any additional data about such a section.

Comment for this answer: Thank you very much. I feel much clearer on this now.


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