SEO tip: updates for structured data in the search results from Google
It’s a grey November October day, the rain drops sticking to my windows and the wind shaking the trees in the neighborhood. Looking through the updates on search results from Google Search Central, we’ve found out that some of the structured data types are about to stop being supported and Book is one of them. Amazing how the weather matches this mood – I feel shaken up but not very surprised about the news.
Here is the news page https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/search-gallery. If you click on Book, you’ll see the note about deprecation. Now what? Initially I thought that it meant the action of booking a service, but no, it is connected to books.
Web businesses are constantly required to adapt and change to reflect different developments like this one. It never gets boring 😅 or is the purpose of changing stuff to make people like me talk about it and generate attention? a sort of marketing trick… The update page doesn’t say what are we supposed to do instead. I’d be curious and check out if anyone had a reaction to this.
Make a plan
Anyway we have a plan: keep the Book plugin and structured data and measure the effect of it. Some SEO channels on YouTube mention structured data as important for AI chat tools such as ChatGPT, so if tests say that the Book plugin was helpful, we’ll keep it.
Additionally we want to add another type of structured data, maybe Product, which is still supported by the Google search engine. The Book plugin generates HTML markup for the visible content. We could add the Product data as a JSON script in the <head> section and see what it brings us. Also we could modify the Book plugin to be a Product plugin and generate the Product HTML markup instead.
Are you using structured data with your web pages? let us know about your experience with the search results in the comments 👇