RYAN LEVERING: Confused about what structured data is
and whether it's worth using on your web pages?
I'm Ryan Levering, a software engineer at Google
who works on connecting teams in Google that
need data for search features with data providers on the web.
In this session, I'll discuss what structured data is,
how it's useful for both Google and you, how to get
started using it, and some best practices if you already do.
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The biggest source of data that Google consumes
is the web itself.
The web is a very loosely-structured collection
of documents.
For a lot of our more modern, richer features,
we need that data to be more structured.
This enables us to provide visual treatments,
such as product review stars or filters for how long
it takes to prepare an apple pie.
While we have technology to find that structure in web page text
automatically, those systems are not perfect.
That's where you come in.
When you tell us what's on your web page in a structured way,
we can more accurately interpret the contents.
This means we can create visual treatments
and show the web page in the correct context for searchers.
That in turn can bring more qualified traffic
to your website because your site can be shown in new ways
to more people on Google Search.
Looking for practical examples?
We have a number of case studies on our developer site
that showcase some practical gains the websites have
seen for implementing several different structured data
types.
The most important thing you can do as a website owner
is to first make sure that Google can crawl your content.
If Google can't crawl your content,
then we can't find the structured data on your page.
Google primarily uses schema.org to describe
the content on your page.
Schema.org is a public collaboration
between a number of different organizations
to create a shared vocabulary to describe data.
It doesn't fully represent every bit of information
in the world, but it does have a lot of broad vocabulary
for many different types of content.
As broad as schema.org, is Google
is primarily interested in certain subsets
of the vocabulary that relate to features
we build that connect people to what they're
looking for on Google Search.
While we never penalize you for having
more accurate structured data on your pages,
it's the best use of your time to focus
on the ones we actively use.
That's where our developer docs come in.
In our docs, we showcase all the major uses of structured data
in Google Search.
You can use the search gallery to find structured data
types that may be a good fit to the type of content
on your website.
There are some features that are very broad
and apply to most websites, like our breadcrumbs feature,
and some that are targeted at a certain type of website.
For example, if you are an e-commerce website,
you may be interested in the product or review features.
And actually, for e-commerce in particular,
we have a guide of some ways to use structured data types
in the link you see.
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RYAN LEVERING: Once you have some idea
of what types of structured data you are interested in, how
you implement it depends on how you manage your website.
If you use a content management system, WordPress
or Squarespace, for example, your best bet
is to find a plugin that exposes structured data automatically
for the content you already have on the web pages.
For instance, if you have an event calendar on your website,
make sure that the plugin has the capability
to produce event structured data and you
have it configured correctly per the documentation.
If you have direct control over the HTML of your website,
there are a couple of different syntaxes
that let you express the schema.org structured data
in the HTML.
There are good reasons to use each syntax.
But usually our recommended approach
is to use JSON-LD because it's the simplest.
JSON-LD is a separate block of JSON-like syntax
that you put on the web page in a script tag
alongside the visual content.
A recommended approach would be to add it to several pages
manually on your website and test them with the Rich Results
Test in Search Console to see whether we are interpreting
the structured data correctly.
Rich Results Test will list the structured data items
that Google uses for specific features on a given
code snippet or URL, and for each item,
show its status and any issues.
After you figure out the right way to produce the markup,
you can implement it more broadly
in any database-templating language you use.
Once you have the structured data implemented
on your website through either approach,
you will begin to get reports from Search Console
on the validity of that structured data for use
in our features over time.
We will also notify you if there are issues with markup
so that you can continue getting rich results.
These reports and notifications are
only possible if you are signed up
with Search Console for your website.
If you want more information on how to do that,
check out Search Console training
in the video description links.
Note that any issues just affect the use of that structured data
in our features.
Having issues will not negatively
affect other aspects of your page in our search index,
and the data might still be valid for consumption
by other search engines.
Speaking of impact, after you implement the structured data,
you can then use Search Console tools
to verify the impact of the structured data
on Google features.
Many of our structured data types
offer search appearance reports on this impression
and interaction rate with corresponding search features.
Now let's take a look at several best practices to keep in mind
when adding structured data to your website.
Keep the structured data relevant.
Using structured data that has nothing
to do with the contents of the page is considered abuse
and can result in penalties.
But even beyond that, try to focus on describing
the core meaning of the page.
For instance, if you have a product page selling
a particular product and you list all the related products
in the markup without differentiating
the main product on the page, that
will make it all the harder for us to use that information.
Try to use unique identifiers.
Some of our features recommend or require
some sort of unique identifier explicitly.
But in general, giving us a stronger identity signal
helps us disambiguate the names of things in your data
so it shows up for the right queries,
for example, giving the street address for an event location
rather than just the city or using an ISBN when describing
a book or adding a social profile
link for an author of an article.
Look for conflicting or redundant structured data.
A very common problem we see is multiple CMS plugins
or separately-authored JSON-LD blocks generating the same data
with slightly different information.
This can sometimes appear like several different things
on the page, which can potentially exclude the page
from having a visual feature.
Examine Search Console reports to look for these problems.
Structured data can be a valuable resource
for your website.
Using it correctly can potentially
lead to more and higher-quality visitors
coming to your website.
We continue to add more features and recommendations over time
to find new ways to connect searchers
with content on the web and increase
our structured understanding of the page.
The information from this video is also
available in our developer documentation, which
has more details on all these topics,
plus detailed guides for the different types
of structured data that we recommend.
Thanks for watching this Lightning Talk.
Feel free to leave comments with the video.
And if you have specific questions,
please follow up in the structured data section
of our community forums.
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