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β€˜How To’ Structured Data Sees Another Google Guideline Update

[ Back to News Page ] Dated: 25-May-2019

Google is widely known to push updates for every single of their entities ironing out errors and making things more streamlined. Their Help Document that was on using ‘How-To’ structured data now has new guidelines about things you should actually avoid doing.

How-To structured data is indeed a markup type that communicates to Google about any piece of content being an actual how-to article. These include all guides, DIYs and other informational writings that are meant to educate people. Also, a page gets eligible to appear in search as a rich result using this How-To markup as well.

Google’s update got announced through Twitter recently notifying all concerned people about them. Mobile-first indexing document also got updated to align with this recent update as well. Here is a short summary of how the document will be different after this update:

Marking Up Steps

Information related to a specific step inside that particular markup is to be included when marking up different steps in any How-To document. This means that you should not mark up non-step data including instances like a summary or introduction section as a step.

Need for Unique Images for Each Step

Unique images are definitely needed when marking them up to a specific step. Already marked images will not work after this update. You should only mark up instructional step images specific for each step and should not use that particular same image in multiple steps for that same how-to. This of course clears up a lot for users telling them what exactly they are not supposed to be doing.

Visibility of Images Is a Must

Also make sure to have your marked-up images visible and highly relevant to content on the page. Visibility and relevancy are must dos with this new update. You should use images that correspond to page content and definitely do not use images that are irrelevant or don’t reflect the How-To content. Also, don’t use different images to optimize the rich-result.

One Page Should Have One Set of Structured Data

The newly updated guideline also highlighted the need for only one instance of How-To markup to be used for any one given page. You should not have more than one how-to markup for a single page no matter how large that page might be.

When there are multiple sets of instructions for your How-To guide, you may be in the best-case wo separate them into several pages. This is of course applicable when you plan on using the How-To markup. This update also makes it easier and more streamlined for anyone to use the How-To markup telling Google that it is intended to be an educational or instructional writing.

You can see the full guide here.