GOOGLE STRUCTURED DATA REQUIREMENTS UPDATED!

Recently, Google has advanced its developer page mainly for article-structured data, which includes recipe articles. The update directly connected with the modification and publication dates. Additional features are optional (kind of recommendations), you can use them if find relevant for your content. Moreover, where you either intentionally or unintentionally forget to use these features in your structured data, then Google’s structured data testing tool in such a case would not provide any warning alert. This is the only reason, which gives you a stop to think about these additional properties.

What alterations have taken place on Google Developer’s Page?

As we have stated earlier that the additional features i.e. published and modified date properties are optional, therefore it does not put any obligations on publishers. It is their choice whether to use in their content or not.  Moreover, Google’s developer page that associated with article schema has updated as well.

Should you consider using these properties?

These properties are mainly focused when an article has circulated. If we talk about its applications, then it covers only those topics that change time to time or does not have evergreen nature. For example, product reviews, information provided by technology and finally yet importantly news these are fixed in nature. Using these properties can also help the Google as well as readers in order to find out the date of publication of an article. It will helpful for those people to whom publication date take prior importance.

Should publishers of evergreen content adopt certain properties?

Evergreen content is a type of content, which remains relevant all year around such as articles, movie reviews, a summary of a particular novel etc. If the content, in any case, is updated it should be brought into notice to google as well as to the visitors of your website that a particular content has been modified and it contains the relevant content for its users.

For instance, in a technology-based article whereby the technology is updated, it is the duty of the tutorial to be updated of such content to make it relevant. The Date Modified Property is helpful for indicating that a particular content has been modified. This not only makes the article more interesting but also helps the potential visitors to a site to know about the relevance of a particular article.

Should recipe bloggers utilize these properties?

Often, recipe content is considered as evergreen content, but according to a few people, these recipes help to specify that how a dish can cook in a specified time and can vary as well.

Example of Schema.org datePublished

Formal documentation on schema.org has given an absolute example that how to take advantage of datePublished property with JSON-LD.

According to the above-explained example, if you want to add some extra dates in the article then it is very easy to do. All you need to do is just add a line in the befitting category of the type of article.

How to utilize dateModified?

As shown in the example, you can also use the dateModified property as well.