Google to focus even more on Structured Data in 2018 - Are you ready?

The importance of structured data isn't news to you if you've been with SEN for any length of time. Structured Data has been part of the conversation every single month of 2017. And if you participated in any (or all) of our Advanced Training Courses this year then you may even be tired of hearing about it! Well, just to be sure you understand'Why' we've been drilling it into your head - Google just shared plans to focus on it even more in 2018.

During Google's Gary Illyes' Pubcon presentation he spent a large portion of his time talking specifically about structured data. He made it VERY clear that Google will continue to focus on new ways to pull your site's structured data markup into new innovative search features. He then went on to explained that adding structured data to your site can result in higher rankings because Google can understand your site better, which makes sense. Here's how he put it...

Structured data. This is one of those things that I want you to pay lots of attention to this year.

We launched a bunch of search features that are based on structured data. It was badges on image search, jobs was another thing, job search, recipes, movies, local restaurants, courses and a bunch of other things that rely solely on structure data, schema.org annotations.

It is almost like we started building lots of new features that rely on structured data, kind of like we started caring more and more and more about structured data. That is an important hint for you if you want your sites to appear in search features, implement structured data...

But more importantly, add structure data to your pages because during indexing, we will be able to better understand what your site is about.

A word of warning...

With the increased importance of structured data will come more guidelines and restrictions on how and when to use markup. Those who ignore those guidelines will end up with manual action penalties that will effectively erase all of your site's rich snippets until you fix the issues. Here's how a recent Google blog post explained it:

In case your website is affected by such a manual...