Google logo schema now supports ImageObject type, in addition to the URL type, according to updated information on the help document. Google said this provides “new flexibility” to specify an organization logo using these schema markup.
What is new. The logo required properties use to just say it accepted the URL property, but now it says both URL or ImageObject. Here is a screenshot of this section of the help document:
ImageObject type gives you the ability to add additional data to an image, such as width and height, or the author or a caption. Whereas the URL type did not give you these added values.
Why we care. Google is giving us a bit more flexibility with implementing logo schema and structured data going forward. So if you are using these schema, you may decide that going forward that you want to use ImageObject type over URL type – or not.
Google has removed 12 documented structured data fields from its help documents citing these were removed because they are “unused by Google Search and Rich Result Test doesn’t flag warnings for them.”
What was removed. Google removed 12 different structured data fields from within HowTo, QApage and SpecialAnnouncements rich results types. These include:
QAPage: mainEntity.suggestedAnswer.author, mainEntity.dateCreated, mainEntity.suggestedAnswer.dateCreated, mainEntity.acceptedAnswer.author, mainEntity.acceptedAnswer.dateCreated, and mainEntity.author fields.
SpecialAnnouncement: provider, audience, serviceType, address, and category fields.
Google removed these 12 fields from the help documents to more accurately describe what Google Search and the Rich Results Test support.
Remove the code? Should you remove the code and fields from your structured data and code on your web pages? No, you do not have to. Google simply will not support them, but it doesn’t hurt you to keep the fields populated on your pages. Google simply won’t use them for Google Search.
Why we care. If you are using these fields, just be aware that these have been officially removed from Google’s Search help documentation. They do not work for rich results in Google Search and the testing tool won’t notify you if there are errors or warning with these field types.
Again, you do not need to remove the fields from your structured data, but Google will simply ignore them.
Google updated the article structured data help document to add new author properties to the list of recommended properties you can use in Google Search. The company said it added a new recommended author.url property to the article structured data documentation.
What is author.url. The author.url property is a new recommended property you can add to your article structured markup that is essentially a link to a web page that uniquely identifies the author of the article. This link can be to the author’s social media page, an about me page, a biography page or some other page that helps identify this author.
Alternative. Google also said in the help documents that “you can use the sameAs property as an alternative.” Google can understand both sameAs and url when disambiguating authors, the company said.
Why it’s important. Some authors, like myself, write across two or more websites. Giving the search engine a way to identify that the same author wrote articles on site A and on site B can help Google better understand the author’s footprint. It might be used for the new article carousel in the author knowledge panels and for broader reasons at Google.
Why we care. If your site publishes articles, it might benefit you to add this new property to your article structured data. Who knows if Google will use it more broadly than just in the author knowledge panels, and use it to try to understand the expertise of a specific author across multiple sites. Maybe, just maybe, that can help your site rank better in the long term. That is assuming SEOs spammers do not manipulate it and post-fact author markup for their stories.
Google has added several new technical and content quality guidelines to the math solver structured data help documentation over the weekend. The new guidelines list a number of requirements in order to be able to show math solver and practice problem rich results in Google Search.
Technical guidelines. The new technical guidelines call for your site to have the structured data, that your server can handle Googlebot crawling your site, how you deal with duplicate math solver elements and ensuring the content is visible and not behind a paywall.
Here are those guidelines:
Add MathSolver structured data to the home page of your site.
If you have several identical copies of the same math solver hosted under different URLs, use the canonical URLs on each copy of the page.
Google doesn’t allow math solvers that are entirely hidden behind a login or paywall. Once users navigate from the feature on Google to your site, the solution and a step-by-step walkthrough for their initial problem must be accessible to them. Additional content can be behind a login or paywall.
Content guidelines. The new content guidelines aim to ensure that the content in your math solver problems are not promotional and also provide accurate and quality-based answers. Here are those new guidelines:
We don’t allow promotional content disguised as a math solver, such as those posted by a third party (for example, affiliate programs).
You are responsible for the accuracy and quality of your math solver through this feature. If a certain amount of your data is found to be inaccurate based on our quality review processes, then your solver may be removed from the feature until you resolve the issues depending on the severity. This applies to:
The accuracy of the problem types your solver is capable of solving.
The accuracy of your solutions for math problems your solver declares it can solve.
What practice problems look like. Google explained it as an “interactive feature that tests your knowledge of high school math, chemistry and physics topics directly on Search.” Here is a GIF of it in action:
Google added the structured data help documents back in March of this year. The company added these new guidelines late last week.
Another change made to the help document is that Google removed solution page markup instructions and said that it is fine to remove any existing solution page markup.
Why we care. If you are in the online education content business, you may want to leverage these new structured data types to get more exposure in the Google Search results. These may help increase your click-through rates on some of your snippets in the search results and it may help you gain more traffic to your site. It may also lead to fewer clicks, if the answer is solved directly on Google’s site but you should be able to track that within Search Console if they add this data to the performance report.
If you want to show up for math solver rich results, make sure you are in accordance with both the technical and content guidelines.
Google has updated its technical guidelines for Fact Check structured data saying that a page must only have one ClaimReview element and that multiple fact checks per page is no longer allowed.
The revised guidelines. The revised guidelines now say “to be eligible for the single fact check rich result, a page must only have one ClaimReview element. If you add multiple ClaimReview elements per page, the page won’t be eligible for the single fact check rich result.”
Previously the guidelines said “a single page can host multiple ClaimReview elements, each for a separate claim.” But that is no longer the case, now you can only have one ClaimReview element per page, not more, to be eligible to show fact check rich result in Google Search.
Before screenshot. Here is a screenshot of the guidelines before this change was made:
After screenshot. Here is what the page looks like now:
Why we care. If your site does show fact check rich results in search and you are using multiple ClaimReview elements on a single page, you may want to remove all ClaimReview elements but one. Google’s guidelines now only allow one per page and thus your rich results for Fact Check may stop showing if you are showing more than one per page.
Google seems to have resolved the bug it has with showing review snippets or stars in the search results. We are now able to see the gold yellow stars for many search results in the Google Search results.
Timeline. The bug began creeping into the Google Search results interface on Wednesday, July 21st based on the reports that were sent to us. By the following day, Thursday, July 22nd, the review starts were hard to find for any query you conducted in Google. Google confirmed the issue on Friday, July 23rd. Then yesterday afternoon, Monday, July 26th, the issue started to get resolved where now everyone seems to be able to see review stars in the Google Search results.
Reporting issues. Google also wrote on the data anomalies page that between July 19th and 23rd in the Google Search Console Performance reports for Google Search, “Due to an internal issue, you may see a drop in your Review snippet and Product rich results performance during this period. We regret any problems this may have caused on your site.” So make sure to annotate your own internal reports about this issue.
Why we care. Google was not showing review stars in the search results and that can lead to a lower click through rate from the search results. Lower click through rates can lead to less traffic and less traffic can lead to less conversions. But at the same time, your competitors likely did not show the review stars, so everyone was in the same boat.
Google has confirmed it is fixing two search related bugs that impact what is shown and displayed in the Google search results. The issues are with review stars showing in the search results and how Google processes soft 404 documents. The two issues seem to be unrelated but are both being addressed and fixed by Google.
Soft 404 bug leading to de-indexing issues
A couple of weeks ago, we reported that Google changed how it detects soft 404 pages and that led to some pages being removed from the Google Search index. In short, Google said it now does soft 404 detection by device type, which caused some to see spikes in soft 404 errors but not clearly seeing if those pages were in the Google index or not.
Google has confirmed this morning both on Twitter and on YouTube that the company has pushed out a change to address the issue over the next few days. Google wrote “you may have noticed an increase in soft 404 error reports in Search Console the past few weeks.” “The team identified the classifier that was causing the issue and deactivated it while they fine-tune it,” the company added. That was written by Gary Illyes of Google.
John Mueller of Google said earlier this morning “we saw a bunch of these reports recently, in the past couple of weeks, and the team has been looking into that, and I think they turned one of classifiers off now based on some of the feedback that we got.” “So I would suspect that maybe this will catch up again and work out in the next couple of days and week or so.” John Mueller added.
So you should see improvements on this front in the upcoming days.
Review snippets and stars go missing
Over the past couple of days, Google Search has stopped showing, for the most part, review snippets. Those stars that are placed under some of the search results that have review structured data. Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed this afternoon that this is indeed a bug and Google will hopefully fix it soon.
I asked Danny Sullivan about this on Twitter and he responded “yes, it looks like there is a bug. We’re looking at it further and hope to correct soon.”
Here are screenshots that illustrate the before and after that I personally captured.
Review snippets from two days ago:
Review snippets from this morning:
As you can see, the stars are not showing up but Google is now aware and the issue should be resolved soon.
Why we care. All of these bugs can directly impact your traffic from Google Search. When Google resolves the bugs, it may lead to more traffic to your site from Google Search. In the first case, of the soft 404 bug, Google was not listing some pages in its search results that it will soon re-list after the bug is resolved. The second case, of the review stars, Google was/is not showing review stars in the search results that can lead to a lower click through rate from the search results.
Hopefully both will be fully resolved soon and you will see a positive impact in your traffic.
