Make sure you don't lose your Rich Results.
Sign up for alerts to stay on top of changes for Google Rich Result requirements and Schema.org updates.
Google updated the Video structured data documentation to state that the thumbnailUrl property must use one of the supported Google Images file formats. Previously, the documentation didn't include WebP and SVG.
Google updated the 'key moments' section of their Video rich results documentation. In addition to clarification that Google will try to automatically detect the segments in videos, guidance has also been provided on how to manually inform them of important points within videos.
Details are also given on how to opt out of the key moments feature using the nosnippet meta tag.
Google removed the interest form for the Key moments feature, from their Video rich results documentation. The feature remains in development with a select group of providers, but the program is no longer accepting submissions.
Google updated the Job Posting rich results documentation, on one of the new 'Education and experience' beta properties: experienceRequirements.monthsOfExperience.
They have added an additional example to clarify the meaning of 'minimum number of months of experience'.
This is a brand new rich result, designed for websites that provide practice questions for maths and science topics, to help students and teachers find your educational and learning material more easily. You can mark up your page with structured data to make your practice questions eligible to appear in Google Search results.
The practice problems feature is available in English in all regions where Google Search is available. The feature is only available for math and science topics, for multiple choice and checkbox question types, and on desktop and mobile.
This is a brand new rich result, designed for websites that provide solutions to mathematics problems. You can mark up your page with structured data to indicate the type of maths problems your solver can help with, and provide step-by-step walkthroughs for specific problems.
Updated the recommended properties for Dataset to include the optional isAccessibleForFree property. This is simply a yes/no that indicates whether the dataset is available for free or not.
Google added a whole new section to the documentation, entitled 'Education and experience properties (beta)', regarding job requirements or educational qualifications.
In total there are 5 new recommended properties:
As per usual with beta updates, these have a caveat that you may not see any appearance or affect in Google Search right away.
Google added support for the identifier 'JP e-code' as an accepted PropertyValue.
The PropertyValue entity is used as the identifier property, which is a recommended property for Book (Edition).
Changes to the Core section:
Additionally, changes made to the 'Pending' section.
Google updated the Review snippet rich results documentation, changing the itemReviewed property to 'One of the valid types', where the valid types are listed underneath.
Previously this value was 'Thing', with the caveat that only the listed types are valid, so functionally nothing has changed here. However it suggests Google were seeing invalid markup where users were reading 'Thing' and not reading the rest, so it serves as a reminder to ensure your Review snippet markup is valid.
Google updated the Event documentation to clarify the requirement for 'offers', which is one of the recommended properties.
For offers.priceCurrency, it now states that an ISO 4217 currency code must be used (e.g. USD). Previously, it simply stated '3-letter currency code', so this update mostly serves as clarification.
Google updated the documentation for paywalled content, to clarify that the guide only applies to content that you want to be crawled and indexed.
Notably, they also added a section 'Control what information is shown in search results', which explains how to exclude certain sections of content from appearing in search result snippets.
If you include a specific price (not a range) in your Product structured data, Google will now automatically calculate when a price has dropped (based on the running historical average of your product's pricing). In their example, Google show this as 'Price: $200 (typically $300)'.
Currently only available in the US, in English, on both desktop and mobile devices.
Job Training is currently in beta, and Google had previously stated that they were slowly rolling out coverage through the US.
The documentation has been changed to clarify that the appearance isn't available on Google Search right now - if you had previously seen Job Training results in Google Search, this will not be the case at the moment. They have not published a timeline for this to change.
Following vocal support from the community, Google have reversed their decision to deprecate the Structured Data Testing Tool (SDTT). Instead, the tool will be 'refocused' and migrated to a new domain, by April 2021.
This new tool will be focused on checking Schema.org syntax and compliance, but will NOT validate Google Search Features. Going forward, Google's recommendation will be to use their Rich Results Test for validating Google Search Features, and then separately using this new incarnation of the SDTT for validation against Schema.org.
Changes to the Core section:
Additionally, changes made to the 'Pending' section.
Google added a new content guideline to the documentation for QAPage, relating specifically to pages about STEM education Q&As. Pages where the primary focus is to provide a correct answer to a user-submitted homework question may be eligible for a Q&A carousel experience. These pages may only have a single answer that's provided or selected by in-house experts (instead of users).
The docs also include an example: "An education page where a user submitted a single question, and a top answer is selected by experts."
Back in January, Google announced that data-vocabulary.org markup will stop being eligible for Google search result features and enhancements. In April, they postponed the change due to the Coronavirus situation. Now they have updated their original blog post and supporting documentation to confirm they will be deprecating support for data.vocabulary.org markup on January 29th 2021.
For LibrarySystem, one of the required properties is 'additionalProperty.value', which must use one of 6 specific values. Google updated the documentation to replace 'national' with 'government.'
Only applicable when dealing with a third-party job site, you can provide a different logo for a given organization than the image shown in the organization's Knowledge Graph card, by including the logo property in the hiringOrganization array.
Google updated the Job Posting documentation to add image ratio specifications to this property (hiringOrganization.logo); the image width and height ratio must be between 0.75 and 2.5.
You can now add shipping costs and estimated delivery timeframes, which can appear in the Overview and Stores tabs for a specific product result. Currently only available in the US, in English, and on mobile devices.
Updated the eligibility guidelines required to enable the Fact Check Rich Result, which now includes all relevant guidelines in one place (previously some of them were only mentioned in the Publisher Center article about fact-checked content).
Some new guidelines were also added:
Clarified that bestRating and worstRating are recommended properties if you want to specify a different scale than the default 5-point system. Previously they had been listed as required properties, but they were only required if the rating system is not a 5-point scale (which led to confusion).
Clarified that bestRating and worstRating are recommended properties if you want to specify a different scale than the default 5-point system. Previously they had been listed as required properties, but they were only required if the rating system is not a 5-point scale (which led to confusion).
