These are guidelines that would need to be followed for all structured data, in order to have the structured data rendered in Googles’ search results.
Technical Guidelines to Follow
1. Formatting
You should use either Microdata, JSON-LD or RDFa to add structured data as these are the supported formats.
2. Accessibility
Make sure that there are no crawling hindrances on the robots.txt file, and there is no usage of the “noindex” tag.
Quality Guidelines to Follow
Not having your content follow the stipulated quality guidelines may make your content get flagged as spam, which in turn negatively affects SEO.
1. Content
- Don’t publish misleading content such as fake reviews or content
- Don’t use structured data to mislead users
- Follow the general Google webmasters quality guidelines
- Don’t markup any illegal content
- Ensure that you use correct and up-to-date information
- Ensure that you don’t mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page
2. Completeness
You need to specify all required properties in order to obtain a rich result type
Filling many required properties as much as possible, will lead to high quality results, meant for users
3. Location
Structured data needs to be included on the page described in the data
For multiple pages with similar content, it is recommended to include the same structured data within all the pages
4. Images
Ensure that Images are specified accordingly, and that they belong to the instance of the type. As an example, if an image is specified as a property to a specific article, then the image needs to belong specifically to that article
All images should be indexable and crawlable
5. Relevance
Structured data should be an actual representation of the page data. If for example a site is labelled as a news site, then it shouldn’t include details such as recipes.
6. Specificity
As much as possible, try to use the most appropriate type and property names defined by schema.org within your markup.