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The New Schema.org Structured Data Validator

Ryan Shelley, CPBI

May 17, 2021

It’s official, Schema.org has launched its schema markup validator tool at validator.schema.org. The markup validator helps you validate your structured data on your site that is used for general purposes, outside of the Google rich results testing tool. This marks the official move of the old Structured Data Testing Tool over to Schema.org.

Video Transcript:

So we got a new structured data validator and it’s… So schema.org finally released the structured data validator that we’ve been waiting for so let’s talk a little bit about what it is and what makes it different from the previous version over at Google. We have a new tool kind of, not 100% new tool, but it is a tool that is now officially moved over to schema.org and you can find it at validator.schema.org.

Validating Our Structured Data

This is a market validator that helps us validate our structured data. It’s going to mostly be used for general purposes and it’s outside of the rich results testing tool. If you want to learn more about that tool, you can check out our video on the rich results testing tool. Google originally launched the structured data testing tool back in 2015. In 2017, they launched the rich results testing tool and it came out of beta in 2020.

When it came out of beta, Google said that they were going to depreciate its structured data testing tool. Now, there was a lot of backlash in the community when Google decided to do that because obviously people who were implementing schema.org and other pieces or types of structured data leveraged that tool quite a bit. So this move really marks the official move of that old tool over to schema.org.

Now, as I said, Google decided to migrate that tool off their own domain and onto schema.org to better support open standards and development experiences and they were refocusing that tool’s use by migrating it to that new domain and disconnecting it from its legacy at Google. The goal was to do this by April 2021. We’re a little bit behind schedule if you’re looking at this video, but hey, we’ve made it.

The main purpose of the structured data tool is to check syntax and compliance with markups, specifically in the schema.org standards. It’s no longer going to have anything connected to the rich results tests tool. It’s only going to be focused now on schema.org.

What Is New?

So what’s new? Ryan Levering from schema.org says that this new version is a little bit more simple than the predecessor. Again, it’s dedicated 100% to checking the JSON-LD, RDFA in warning you if you’ve got any issues with your markup, your types or properties, or any kind of unusual combination. It’s not going to check your content against the information needed for like specific services or tools or products. It’s not going to tell you about rich results and how you might impact there. That’s what the rich results testing tool is for. It’s just going to help us understand if our data is expressed in the way that we intended it to be expressed and it’s reflecting in the structure data.

You can read more on this by checking out Barry Schwartz’s article on Search Engine Land. He goes a lot deeper into some of these little factors, but it’s not this really deep in-depth piece of news in the SEO industry. We just have the tool now over at schema.org and now let’s take a look at how it looks a little bit different and how we can still use this tool.

A Different Look

Here we are at schema.org and we’re at validator.schema.org. As you can see, it’s in the beta version. It looks a lot like the structure data testing tool. You would just put in a URL like we would in the past, and you run the test. Again, very similar to what we would see from Google. It’s going to run the test. We’re going to see on the left-hand side, the code, and on the right-hand side, we’re going to see all the detected types of schema.org markup.

On this page, we’ve got organization. We can open it like we used to, be able to see all the different organizational markup. We’ve got video objects. Once again, all the same objects there. Website, any type of schema.org markup will be able to show up here. Over here, we’ll see the code like we used to in the past. It still works the same way. I can target a website and it will bring me to that piece of code right down here and we can kind of look at how it’s performing there.

Testing Code Snippets

Now with this, we also are able to test code snippets still. Again, I can hit new test up here at the top and I can select code snippet and we can use generated JSON-LD like we have over here on our structured data generator. We can just copy that information over and paste our code in here and we can run tests on JSON. As you can see, this is article markup. We’ve got headline and all the information here.

Again, it’s not showing us anything about rich snippets. It’s just allowing us to look at our structured data and how that structured data is formatted and lets us know if we have any errors or issues or warnings. I’m really happy to see that this tool is continuing. I was a little bit bummed again like many in the SEO community that we’re really frustrated when we thought that Google was just getting rid of it altogether. It’s nice to know that this tool is going to be alive and well.

Making Sure You’re Sending the Right Messages

Honestly, sitting underneath the site, it probably should sit on over here at schema.org because that’s what this tool is intended for. It’s intended to help you validate your schema.org markup to make sure that you’re sending the right messages to the search engines when you’re wanting to give them more contextual information and speak to them in a language that is machine-readable. That’s the goal of this tool.

If you want to do more things with rich results, then you need to go over and make sure that your site is optimized on Google’s guidelines, which are more specifically revolving around search queries. This tool is up and running. Go check it out. It’s technically in beta because they’ve probably got some kinks they have to work out as they migrate things over. But this tool is up and running so check it out.

Now, if you want to do more with structured data and schema.org, we have a course that is completely built for you. You can optimize your site and earn rich features and really take it further than just validating your structured data, but also targeting specific pieces within the search results to improve your visibility, to improve your lead conversion, and to really grow your business using search engines. If you’re interested in this course, you can check it out at learn.simplifiedsearch.net. You get 25% off using the code YouTube.

Thanks so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you’ve got any questions on these tools or tools that we’ve talked about before, please comment below and until next time, happy marketing.

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Ryan Shelley, CPBI

Ryan is passionate about helping companies make a more personal connection online with their customers and prospects. He is a regular contributor to Search Engine Land, the largest and most popular SEO news site on the web. His works have also been featured on the HubSpot Blog, Business2Community and by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions.

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