Why Search Console is finding more and more structured data errors and warnings

A JSON-LD for SEO customer was asking about Google Search Console the other day:

While your rich snippet data may be better than Shopify’s even on a good day, we’re still seeing more & more products being flagged in our search console as time goes on.

First you need to look at the trend graphs:

If you see just a slow growth, that’s Google crawling more of your products. Google will slowly find new pages as you publish them.

If you see spikes, that’s probably from a major change in your store or the Google algorithm. New apps, new themes, or changes to either can cause spikes.

For example, just last week one review app updated their structured data to comply with Google’s guidelines, but they missed a few fields and so now every store has 3 new warnings/errors all of a sudden.

But you need to be careful reading Search Console’s aggregate reports.

The problem is that Search Console reports on every piece of data BUT Google Search will use their smarts and evaluate the data they find and pick only one set that’s the best, ignoring the rest.

Just make sure to take any url Search Reports a problem with and double check it in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool and look for one set of good data. You’ll probably find Search Console is reporting on data that Google Search would just ignore.

Would you like more organic search traffic from Google? With JSON-LD for SEO you can get more traffic, without having to fight for better rankings through the power of Rich Results.