Tools Provide Greater Insight into Parsing Structured Data, Addressing Issues

Google recently announced the addition of three new reports to Search Console, each one related to structured data. These reports comprise two enhancements to the “Sitelinks searchbox” and “Logo” structured data reports and a brand-new “Unparsable Structured Data” report. These first two enhancements give users a way to display and view overall trend, error, warning, and valid items data on a site. Here’s how they look in action:

Google Search Console's new report enhancements in action. — *Image courtesy Google Webmaster Blog.*

Clicking the coloured boxes in these reports lets users review each issue separately. To see what pages are affected by these issues, simply click on the rows below the boxes. The “Unparsable Structured Data” report, meanwhile, “aggregates parsing issues such as unstructured data syntax errors that prevented Google from identifying the feature type.” Basically, Google couldn’t parse the data, so they put the errors in this report. Discovering parsing errors in your site could help you identify opportunities to get more rich results in search. The Unparsable Structured Data report can help you spot and resolve issues—once you do, though, make sure you run the URL through Google’s structured data testing tool to validate it.

What is Structured Data?

Structured data, according to Google, is a “common way of providing information about a page and its content.” Basically, structured data lets you pair a name with a value to help Google’s search engine categorize and index your content. Google recommends using schema.org vocabulary for this. They also support 3 different in-page markup formats: JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa. In short, structured data lets you create content that Google’s systems will more accurately understand, in turn providing more relevant results for users. Structured data is also one of the best ways to get your pages featured in things like rich snippets or results with enhanced appearances.

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