Basics on Google’s New Rich Results Testing Tool

Google regularly adds new tools to help online marketing managers streamline their processes and make them more efficient, and the turn of the new year has seen the behemoth add another tool related to website content additions. The tool, which is meant to help test structured data, has already rolled out in a limited format and will continue to add layers moving forward. Let’s look at the basics.

Simple Basics

The tool, called the “rich results testing” tool, was introduced as a catch-all way to test rich snippets, rich cards, and other “rich” additions to a website’s content. The tool will be capable of testing for all types of structured data that has the ability to be shown as rich results. This includes JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa.

The tool will be able to offer users a more accurate representation of how a page is displayed in search results. It will also include the ability to test structured data within the dynamically loaded content.

First Step

At this moment, the rich results testing tool is capable of testing each of the following types of structured data: Recipes, jobs, movies, and courses. The astute observer will note, of course, that this is a pretty limited subset of all the structured data available – never fear, there’s more to this story.

Google views this as simply just the first step in this rollout. Support for many more data types will be rolled out and made available moving forward.

Using the Tool

To use this new rich results testing tool, you use the same processes as you would for any of Google’s other testing tools. First, enter the URL, then run it through the tool. From here, you can review your results. The tool will highlight the invalid code, so you’ll immediately be pointed to what needs to be fixed if there are problems.

To find out more about Google’s new rich results testing tool, or to learn about any of our search engine optimization services, speak to the pros at SEO Werkz today.