Debugging structured data in the post-SDTT-era
OMG it's ugly, are you serious?!
Awww, thank you. And, yes, I am. If your eyes hurt too much, you can read the beautiful version on Medium.com. Thanks for stopping by.
With Google announcing their Rich Results Test tool was out of beta also came their decision to deprecate their famous Structured Data Testing Tool(SDTT for short). This started a discussion within the SEO community.
What does SDTT have that Rich Results Test doesn't?
That's a long story. For now, I'll be focusing on giving you a list of alternatives for specific use cases. I'll be summarising 'that long story' here soon enough, please bear with me. Until then, you are welcome to read up on it on Twitter:
What are the alternatives?
For SEO QA and/or debugging
My general tool to go for any type of schema.org markup would be Screaming Frog. However, making sense of the parsing errors reported by Screaming Frog can be a bit tricky in the tool - which is when I turn to check the code reported as an error again in other tools (see below) to find out what's causing that error.
The tool of choice depends on what schema.org markup type you chose to use:
JSON-LD
- JSON-LD Playground
- Bing Markup Validator (Thanks, Aleyda!) I would not necessarily regard this as equal to Google's SDTT because Bing's tool can only be used when registered with Bing webmaster, and you can only submit a URL for testing, not a code snippet.
- Yandex Structured data validator validates other formats such as microdata, microformats, RDFa, and OpenGraph too. Thank you, Lily Ray!
Microdata and RDFa
With microdata being a bit outdated, it's mostly Google's tools you'd have to rely on. I'll continue to look for an alternative. If you see any on your way through the web, please let me know, will you?
To find sample code for SEO feature requests
If you need to submit sample code for your feature requests addressing your development team (which we highly suggest), there are a number of resources to help you to generate and then modify schema.org markup to your liking (and validate or debug it with the tools we just named above):
JSON-LD generators
Most of the generators out there will only offer JSON-LD sample code nowadays. If for whatever reason you'd rather feed your microdata or RDFa fetish, be my guest and scroll a bit further down.
- Rank Ranger's Schema Markup Generator
- MERKLE SEO's Schema Markup Generator
- The Ultimate JSON-LD Generator by Jason Macfarlane
- Schema Generator by SEOscout
Microdata generators
If you're feeling a bit retro, these got you covered:
RDFa generators
Now if you're feeling very retro, you might still want to generate RDFa or be looking to transform RDFa to Microdata:
- RDF Translator by RDFLi 4.1.2 converts RDFa to Microdata
- RDFa-Lab by Niklas Lindström converts RDFa to JSON-LD and offers conversion from Microdata to RDFa
Google Tools
If you would rather double-check with Google tools, you can still do that:
- Structured Data Markup Helper can help you create markup for JSON-LD or microdata.
- developers.google.com offers you sample markup you can test in their Rich Results Test for various types, even for those that are not yet rolled out for everyone yet
FAQ
Your website doesn't have any style!
That's right, because I don't have any.
I cannot find out what CMS you're using!
Congrats, you're right: I didn't use any. I honestly lack the patience to fiddle around with a CMS to have it do exactly and JUST what I want it to do in my leisure time. So this is lazily hand-crafted in Sublime.
Where are the images? It's ugly!
You know what else is ugly? Being greedy!
In all honesty though, images are going to come, either here or on Medium. Tonight (and until the day when you're reading this for whatever reason) I just couldn't be bothered. Sleep ftw.
So you've come to the bottom of this page
This article is a living thing, it's likely going to be updated by me. Got a suggestion? Drop me a line on Twitter.