Goodbye to the data-vocabulary support for Google’s rich results
Structured data are one of the tools with which Google is actually working in its evolution, used to activate useful features and to offer increasingly quick answers to users. It is not really a surprise then that this US giant is dedicating more and more attention to this factor, and to the schema.org vocabulary making its integration possible, by saying a final goodbye to the old data-vocabulary.
Google is not going to support data-vocabulary.org anymore
The news comes directly from the Google webmasters blog: from 6th April 2020 on the data-vocabulary.org markup will no longer be suitable to activate the Google’s rich results feature.
Up until now, all the schemes of structured data such as schema.org and data-vocabulary.org were used in a parallel way “to define shared meaningful structures for markup-based applications on the Web”, but, “with the increasing usage and popularity of schema.org“, Google decided to focus its development on a single tool.
What is the Data Vocabulary project
This means the curtains are falling on Google’s “Data Vocabulary” project, that has still been an important milestone in the development of structured data on the Web, even only for the spark it ignited and that later brought to the collaboration among the main search engines to create schema.org.
According to Google, the system was “very outdated and it is generally preferable to use more widely shared vocabulary from Schema.org”, and for that starting from April “data-vocabulary.org markup will stop being eligible for Google search result features and enhancements”.
These screens show the (subtle) differences between the two markups:
Search Console’s notifications for data-vocabulary users
Starting from January 21st and for the next months, then, the company will notify through Search Console the sites using data-vocabulary.org schema in order to offer the webmasters all the times they need to prepare for the deprecation, to easily identify the involved pages using that markup and replace it with the one from schema.org.
After April 6th, instead, the presence of structured data of the data-vocabulary.org kind will be marked as an error (and no longer as a simple warning), and so site owners, webmasters and technicians are all invited to convert the markup as soon as possible so to make their pages correctly eligible for Google rich results.
What to do on our pages
The post further provides us two important pieces of info: first of all, it will still be possible to use the data-vocabulary.org schema for purposes different from rich results – and, then, this markup stays active and valid even if Google chose not to use it anymore – and there is a way to verify the situation on our personal pages.
To test the live code snippets is in fact possible to use the Rich Results Test tool of Google Search Console, that allows us to find out if the page supports or not multimedial result and which kind of typologies can be generated by the page’s structured data.
