SEO Wash-up Monday 24th February

Google

Google is starting to send data-vocabulary.org schema deprecation notices – They have announced that on April 6, 2020 it will no longer support data-vocabulary.org schema. Google says that with the increasing usage and popularity of schema.org, they have decided to focus their development on a single SD scheme.

They are giving webmasters, SEOs, site owners a few months to transition from data-vocabulary markup to schema.org markup. For those who have implemented data-vocabulary markup via Search Console, they have begun sending notifications and warnings for pages, this allows you to easily identify pages using that markup and replace the data-vocabulary.org markup with schema.org.

Google supports Microformats still – As they have mentioned that they are deprecating support for data-vocabulary markup because of the popularity of schema.org, within the SEO community there has been chatter that microformats could be next. Although a spokesman from Google mentions that microformats are still supported and there are no plans to deprecate that now.

Google AMP stories expands – Google launched AMP Stories that was mostly to cover people and news events around the people. However, they have now expanded beyond human beings and to animals, insects and more.

Google hiding like reviews with more link – Although it is not clear whether they are testing or if it is a bug but it seems that Google reviews can be hidden by collapsing them in a “more” links.  Users have been spotting this and there has been chatter on social media on whether they are actually testing this feature or if it is bug.

Bing updates

Microsoft advertising to deprecate average position – They have said that the average position metric from Microsoft Advertising reporting starting in April will be deprecating. Their competitor Google did the same thing last year.

They mention that due to all feedback from their users and their insights into the ever-changing industry standards in digital advertising, they have determined that prominence metrics give a much clearer view of your prominence on the page than average position does.

So in addition to limit confusion for their users and allow them to focus on just the key metrics that really matters, average position will be deprecated from performance reports beginning in April.