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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).
Added regionsAllowed to recommended properties, which allows you to specify the regions in which the video is allowed. If not specified, then Google assumes the video is allowed everywhere.
Changes to the Core section:
Additionally, changes made to the 'Pending' section.
You can now obtain the 'Licensable' label on Google Images results by including the 'license' property.
Correction to an error on the Video documentation page which stated that the required property 'thumbnailUrl' could either be ImageObject or URL, when actually it can only be a URL.
To help people discover activities that they can do from home, you can now add structured data to your online event and video pages - for example for upcoming video livestreams or online events.
Google published a blog post with a video on how to get started with structured data, along with a set of FAQs on rich results and structured data.
Clarified that there are different Article requirements for AMP and non-AMP pages. Added an example of a non-AMP page with Article structured data.
Updated all relevant documentation that images referenced in structured data must be in one of the image file formats that are supported by Google Images.
Updated the recommended properties for OccupationAggregationByEmployer to include the optional jobBenefits and industry properties.
Google added a disclaimer to the Fact Check documentation to clarify that they are 'exploring ways to surface multiple fact checks. You may not see a rich result that features multiple fact checks in Google Search right away.'
