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After testing the critic review markup with a limited number of providers, Google has now determined that the feature 'wasn't useful for the ecosystem at scale', so it has now been deprecated.
When marking up Product data, as a recommended property you can include a nested Offer. One of the recommended properties for Offer is availability, which allows you to specify the current stock availability of the item. Google have now updated this property to allow BackOrder as an allowed value.
Google added the recommended property of gtin (Global Trade Identification Number) as an applicable global identifier. The gtin property generalizes the earlier gtin8, gtin13 and gtin14 properties (which are also still supported by Google).
Separately, the documentation was also updated to clarify that isbn is only a valid property on Book.
Updated the recommended properties for Math solvers to include the optional inLanguage property. Use this property to specify the language(s) that are supported by the maths problem solving website. See this table for a list of supported languages.
Google have updated the Math solvers documentation with the addition of six new problem type definitions:
Problem types are used for either the eduQuestionType for a MathSolver.potentialAction or for the assesses field of a MathSolver when the MathSolver is accompanying a HowTo that walks through a specific math problem.
In Search Console, Google have 'Search appearance types' to help users differentiate where clicks and impressions are coming from. One of these was a generic 'Rich results' group, which covered multiple rich result types (even ones that had their own breakout grouping). So Google are sunsetting this search appearance, and it will be removed from Search Console on August 1st 2021.
Google updated their documentation to clarify that the Job Posting rich result is now also available in Austria and Denmark.
Key moments is a feature that enables Google to include jump-points to specific sections of a video when they display it in the search results. They try to automatically detect where they should be, but also provide the video creator options to manually define the important points in the video. They have updated the ways in which this is possible.
Other than going out of beta, the requirements or guidelines for Clip have not changed.
The Structured Data Testing Tool's new replacement is now in beta, in the form of the Schema Markup Validator tool.
To load any page into the Schema Markup Validator with just one click, we've created a handy bookmarklet which you can find here: Schema Markup Validator bookmarklet.
On their Article structured data documentation, Google updated the required properties for AMP pages, to clarify that publisher.logo can be either a URL or ImageObject, and added examples for each.
Note that the requirements themselves have not changed, it is just a clarification to more accurately reflect that they understand both raw URLs as well as ImageObject markup.
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.
