Google first introduced a way for websites to highlight COVID-19 announcements on Google Search.
Initially, the company was using this information to better highlight announcements made by health and government agency websites to Google Search.
This time, Google is ramping up that effort.
In its blog post, Google said that:
The report allows webmasters and web owners that have implemented the SpecialAnnouncement structured data, to see errors, warnings, and valid pages for markup implemented on their sites.
Using the report, they can immediately figure out which issues need to be fixed, and on which pages.
And to ensure the problem can be adequately addressed, webmasters and web owners can also validate the fix right from the Search Console report.
Validating an error fix in Search Console will trigger Google's crawlers to recrawl the affected pages and confirm whether or not the problem has been solved.
"This means that you can check the impressions, clicks and CTR results of your special announcement pages and check their performance to understand how they are trending for any of the dimensions available. Learn more about the Search appearance tab in the performance report."
The SpecialAnnouncement structured data uses a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.
it can be used by, for example, organizations from the governments, private organizations, schools and more. During the COVID-19 pandemic, their schedules can affect many aspects of people's everyday life in a big way. This can include, and not limited to:
- Announcement of a shelter-in-place directive.
- Closure notice (for example, closing a school or public transportation).
- Announcement of government benefits (for example, unemployment support, paid leave, or one-time payments).
- Quarantine guidelines.
- Travel restrictions.
- Notification of a new drive-through testing center.
- Announcement of an event transitioning from offline to online, or cancellation.
- Announcement of revised hours and shopping restrictions.
- Disease spread statistics and maps.
Using the schema, these entities can publish urgent announcements to can be easily understood by Google.
And with the update, these entities can monitor the appearance of their Rich Results in Google Search, as well as quickly identify and fix implementation errors.
What's more, as shown below, a site's Special Announcements ability can also be tested using Google's Rich Results Test.
"After adding SpecialAnnouncement structured data to your pages, you can test them using the Rich Results Test tool. If you haven’t published the markup on your site yet, you can also upload a piece of code to check the markup. The test shows any errors or suggestions for your structured data," said Google.
