Google has just announced that Rich Results Tool, a tool for testing augmented results in SERPs, has just come out of beta and in its latest version is a really useful tool. The problem, however, will be noticed by technical SEOs, who will read in the announcement, by the way, that we will soon say goodbye to the Structured Data Testing Tool.
The new tool (relatively new, as it has been in existence since 2017) for testing the appearance and correctness of code for extended results has many advantages: it is possible to check results for mobile and desktop, the tool also handles dynamically loaded structured data better. Besides, it’s just convenient.
The problem is that at the moment the tool only tests a page for structural data affecting the page’s display in the SERP. So we will test the validity of data of the FAQPage or Organization type, but hundreds of other types, such as Report or Book, will remain unexplored.
Perhaps the tool will be enriched with a test of unsupported structured data, but until then it is worth starting to look around for an alternative. The selection is not impressive:
- Yandex – validator from Yandex, requires login
- Bing – part of Bing Webmaster Tools
- Structured Data Linter – free structured data validator
- SEO Site Chekup – paid tool, free version will check microdata, requires login
- JSON-LD Playground – a tool for testing data in JSON-LD format
- RDF Translator – tools for converting structured data between formats
Update
After a backlash among webmasters, Google officials announced that the old structured data testing tool will not be abandoned completely, but only moved to the schema.org project site
