Schema Markup Updates You need to know

By Mixbrigade

We already know how important Schema markup is, when it comes to boosting your site SEO. Implementation of structured data gives you an opportunity to be eligible to obtain rich snippets bringing your page content on the top of SERP. Having structured data displayed with your website url, gives you more real estate on SERP. Hence, increases your brand presence for product base brands and can attract potential customers. Last month there have been some important changes on how for some content type structured data needs to be updated.

Schema Markup Updates

Recently, Google has announced some changes regarding structured data especially relating to food recipes and cars. It is important to update structured data whenever there is such a change, to avoid any penalties from Google.

What is Schema Markup?

Schema markup (aka structured data), uses a unique way to provide information to search engines in order to understand content. It is a meta data implemented in the form of a code, which provides users with better, more accurate information in the rich snippets that are displayed beneath the page title.

Schema Markup Update for Food Recipes

Schema Markup for Food recipe Recently, Google has made a slight change to the food recipe schema data rules. When mentioning cooking time, now SEO experts need to add a fixed time rather than the time range. Previously, cookTime, prepTime and totalTime properties used to accept values in terms of time ranges. With this update, now one should mention only a fixed time. For example, this is how to do schema markup for food recipe’s below

Example

“prepTime”: “PT15M”,
“cookTime”: “PT25M”,
“totalTime”: “PT40M”

Schema Markup Update for Cars

Schema Markup update on Cars product Currently Car is not supported automatically as a subtype of Product. So for now, you will need to include both Car and Product types if you would like to attach ratings to it and be eligible for the Search feature. For example, this is how to do schema markup for cars below

{
“@context”: “https://schema.org”
“@type”: [“Product”, “Car”],
….}

A complete guide is available here for Car Schema data

More Structured data Related Updates

Search Console has changed the way that it evaluates and reports errors in Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data. As a result, you may see changes in the number of Breadcrumbs and HowTo entities and issues reported for your property, as well as a change in severity of some issues from errors to warnings.

Are you Beginner in Structured Data?

If you are a beginner in implementing structured data for SEO, I would recommend to go through following resource to brush up your skills.

CodeLabs

This is one of the most refined and concise documentation on how to add a structure data on your website. This will give a step by step instructions to implement structured data. Click here to know more

If you are not familiar with coding a structured data, there are schema markup generators available to quickly generate code and implement on website

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Mixbrigade has a wide experience in digital marketing for many international brands, across multiple B2B and B2C industries and shares his knowledge to help other digital marketers. Please subscribe to the blog.