Do links in the Schema Markup count as external links?

[wikibum]

So, I have a client who is adding Entity schema to posts, where she references the Wikipedia page a specific post is about. In one of the schema markups - she has references to 4 different Wikipedia pages. For example: Let's say she has a page about Peanut Butter. She would add a reference to the Wikipedia page for Peanut Butter in the Schema and then maybe another Wikipedia page for Nuts, Peanut and Allergies maybe. That's 4 Wikipedia page links within the Schema markup only.

Would Google consider those as external links, even though they are in JSON markup? I am guessing - yes, but wanted to get your guys thoughts on it.

And.. do you see any negatives in doing that?

 

[Steptoe]

Google does see them as links - I've certainly had pages crawled via JSON-LD (orphaned pages, so it's at least pretty likely that was the source of Googlebot seeing those urls), but I doubt it's enough to maintain them in the index.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I think that they're crawlable and will be used for URL discovery (just like any unlinked but not-malformed URL is, even in Gmail and Sheets and all that).

I don't think they count as an external link in the sense of being a part of your outbound link profile within the visible content. I don't think they flow page rank.