Structured data is an important aspect of technical SEO that helps to communicate information to search engines like Google. Recently, Google have made changes to which structured data fields they use when analysing a web page. Google have announced the removal of 12 structured data fields that were unused by Google Search and stated that their Rich Result Test won’t flag warnings for them. In addition, Google have also removed the fields from their help documents.
The affected fields sit within HowTo, QAPage and Special Announcement categories and include:
- HowTo
- description field
- QAPage
- mainEntity.suggestedAnswer.author
- mainEntity.dateCreated
- mainEntity.suggestedAnswer.dateCreated
- mainEntity.acceptedAnswer.author
- mainEntity.acceptedAnswer.dateCreated
- mainEntity.author
- SpecialAnnouncement
- provider
- audience
- serviceType
- address
- category
While Google no longer supports these fields, it doesn’t mean they need to be removed. Google will simply ignore these structured data fields and they do not work for rich results in Google Search. Be aware, if you use the Rich Result Testing Tool to validate code, it will no longer flag errors with these field types either.
If you’re interested in learning more about rich snippet results in Google or would like to know more about what’s included in our SEO packages, call our team today!