On 7th July 2020 Google announced that it’s tool for testing Rich Snippets on your webpages will move out of the beta stage into full release, and the Structured Data Testing Tool would soon be no more.
This move means an increase of information provided by the Rich Results Test, as well as some enhanced features over the previously recommended Structured Data Testing Tool.
What are Rich Snippets?
Rich Snippets are enhancements to the search results. Rather than having your website listing appear in Google with just the blue page title and short description, Rich Snippets add extras to this such as price, stock, reviews, images, carousels etc.
How do I get Rich Results?
In order to get your pages to show Rich Results in Google, you will need to add Rich Data to these pages (this is data specifically aimed at search engines written in a uniform way they can process). This extra information is usually added to the code of the website so there is no visible difference to the pages of the website.
Don’t use the Structured Data Testing Tool
While Google has said that this is currently live, for now, it will soon be turned off. Google didn’t give an exact date for this so we recommend switching to the Rich Results Test immediately so that you can get used to it and won’t be caught out by the old tool being depreciated.
Why use the new Rich Results Testing Tool
This tool is great for seeing what Rich Data your page already has on it, as well as seeing any errors and warnings with this data. This makes it great at detecting and fixing errors as well as highlighting what other data can be added to a page.
The new Rich Results Test also renders both mobile and desktop versions in the results, so you can see how it will look on both. Google says that this tool is much better at handling dynamically loaded rich data and that the reports are fully aligned to what you would see in Google Search Console.
These added features and continued support show how much Google values Rich Data and wants website owners to add this to their websites. If you want to know more about improving your SEO by adding Rich Data to it, contact our SEO Team.
