Webmaster Tools Showing Sharp Drop in Structured Data
Carrie Hill

July 16, 2014 |

UPDATE 7/21/2014:
It looks like these drops in data have been removed from the WMT Dashboard. None of our clients are showing the sharp drops we had snapshots of in the article below. Since this also happened earlier this year – I suspect this is a reporting bug that Google hopefully gets fixed soon.

Same data/timespan as graphic 1 below:

Screen Shot 2014-07-21 at 1.40.05 PM

Same data/timespan as graphic 2 below:

Screen Shot 2014-07-21 at 1.40.05 PM

——–

We’ve noticed some sharp drops in Structured Data reporting within Google Webmaster tools this week. It looks like the decline started on July 8th and continued through July 14, 2014.

At first blush I thought this was related to the Authorship changes from Google – but further digging shows the drop affected all types of markup from LocalBusiness to Recipe and Creative Work. It’s a pretty harsh to drop from nearly 200 pieces of recipe markup down to 5 on my recipe blog.

Screen Shot 2014-07-15 at 2.26.56 PM

One lodging client lost over 250 pieces of Aggregate Review markup. That’s a pretty significant hit!

While looking for a reason for the drop – I did run across this post from Search Engine Roundtable that noticed the problem in early June 2014 – a post script indicated that the drops had recovered in most cases. Hopefully we see these drops recover as well.

structure data drop in GA 2

Is Google devaluing more than just Authorship Structured Data?

Posted in
Carrie Hill

Carrie Hill

Carrie comes to Sterling Sky with SEO experience that dates back to 2005! She has a passion for figuring out what works for each and every client and picking apart the problems that arise in our “it depends” relationship with Google. She has also been organizing and nurturing the LocalU Conference Series since 2017 – through to today – across a hectic few years of pandemic and back into in-person conferences again.

View Posts