Tech giant Google changed how it evaluates and reports errors in product structured data. The Google Search Console products update was announced on Tuesday, December 28th. The development means users may see a change in errors going forward.
The rich result report is viewable on Google Search Console. The update could result in a change in the number of product entities reported for their property and a change in the severity of some issues from errors to warnings. The company failed to elaborate more on the Google Search Console products update at the moment.
However, Google will annotate reports which might lead to a decrease or increase in the error numbers. So this has nothing to do with the change in reporting on the user’s end. Also, the update by Google does not affect search results, so there’s no cause for alarm. However, it is advisable to review all the errors, issues, and warnings specified by Google in the report.
Google has also made several changes to the rich result report. In October, it enforced a 99 character limit on author names in the review rich results. At the time, Google warned that users might see an increase in the number of errors in their review rich results.
A review rich result (formerly referred to as rich snippet) is a short excerpt from a review website on Google search results. It usually averages the combined ratings of many viewers. Rich results are vital to a user’s search and display additional information about page content, which helps them to understand exactly what they find if they click through to the page. This helps to improve engagement with visitors to your site and decrease the bounce rate.
Learn more about how Google’s rich results work and other SEO issues from our marketing experts at EverConvert.
