We’ve curated some of the big news surrounding Schema markup for the week to help you stay on top of changes and news:
This informative article by Moz guest author Alexis Sanders does a good job of providing a comprehensive overview of the importance of structured data (Schema markup). In addition to providing industry context about why this new realm of SEO is crucial, it provides some real world examples of the benefits of adding Schema markup to your website.
Version 3 of schema.org’s legislation extension has been released. The update adds vocabulary for legal use, including properties from CreativeWork. This extension is derived from the ELI ontology (European Legislation Identifier). ELI is an initiative of some national legislation publishers endorsed by EU countries and Institutions, to identify, describe and link legislation on the web.
The biggest takeaway from this change is that now Google explicitly describes the difference between rich results for AMP and non-AMP pages. According to these guidelines, “your page is eligible for different features depending on how you code your page”. So Google is now explicitly saying that articles NEED Schema Markup in order to be eligible for the AMP carousel.
Required and recommended page guidelines have changed too. Now the required and recommended fields change based on whether the page is an AMP page or not. Currently under these new rules, there are no required properties for non-AMP pages.