Google Search can enable a rich set of features for your webpage in their search results, particularly if it understands the content of the page and, in some circumstances, if additional information is explicitly provided in the page code using structured data.
When you use structured data to mark up web page content, you help Google better understand its context for display in Search, and you can achieve better distribution of your content to users from the search results. You do this by marking up content properties and enabling actions where relevant. This makes it eligible for inclusion in rich results which allows users to engage directly with web page content right from the Search results.
Structured data features fall into two general categories: Content type and Enhancements.
Content type
Many search features are tied to the topic of your page. For example, if the page has a recipe or a news article, or contains information about an event or a book. Google Search results can then apply content-specific features such as making your page eligible to appear in a top news stories carousel, a recipe carousel, or an events list.
Enhancements
These are features that, can be applied to more than one kind of content type.
For example, providing review stars for a recipe or movie, or exposing a carousel of rich results.
Rich result status reports in Google Search Console are used to learn which rich results Google could or couldn’t read from your site, plus they show troubleshooting information for rich result errors and request a re-crawl after you have fixed any problems. Rich result reports for your site are listed under ‘Enhancements’ in the menu panel.
To see a report for a specific rich result type, Google must find rich results of that type in your website’s property and it must be one of the supported rich result types.
When using the report, ideally you should not see any current errors in your rich result data, so the current error count should be 0. If warnings are found, they do not disqualify the rich results from being shown in Google Search with special features, but they can provide a somewhat reduced experience for users.
Any warnings or errors that are shown can be addressed by following the prioritise and fix guidelines. Once those are resolved, you can return to the issue details page and click the ‘Validate Fix’ button to begin the validation process. This process can take several days and you will receive email notifications of the progress.
This report is extremely useful in helping to discover and fix structured data issues, which in turn will assist Webmasters in using that information to engage users with the site directly from the Search results.
If you want to know more about how the use of structured data and rich results status reports can help your business, contact us now.