Google Search Central's Recent Update on Structured Data: What You Need to Know
On August 8, 2023, Google Search Central announced a major change to the way structured data is used in search results. Starting in October 2023, structured data will no longer provide any ranking advantage, except for government and healthcare websites. This means that website owners who have been using structured data to improve their search rankings will need to find other ways to optimize their content. What is structured data? Structured data is a way to organize and format information on a web page so that it can be easily understood by search engines. Structured data is typically encoded using JSON-LD, RDFa, or Microdata. Why is Google making this change? Google says that it is making this change to improve the overall quality of search results. The company believes that structured data is no longer necessary to rank websites accurately, and that it can actually be harmful in some cases. For example, some website owners have been using structured data to manipulate their search ...