Wednesday, November 15, 2023
As people continue to search for courses on Google, the desire for more detailed course information has grown. Today, we are announcing a new set of recommendations to provide course structured data to Google. Publishers now have the opportunity to surface supplemental course information on Google Search by providing detailed information like pricing, educational level, ratings, and length with structured data. This data can appear in the course info rich result, which is a new carousel feature in Google Search that helps learners discover and compare courses that fit their unique needs.
Displaying your courses within course structured data features
For the past few years, Google has been supporting a course list markup feature (previously called “Course”), where a single publisher could provide course structured data (name, description, and publisher). The course list rich result will continue to be supported, and your traffic will not be affected regardless of whether you decide to add the new course info markup. We will continue to use the same schema.org structured data type for both features.
The new course info developer documentation explains how to fill required and recommended fields. Your courses can then be eligible to show in both the existing course listing feature and the new course info feature if you meet the feature guidelines and eligibility criteria.
Verifying and monitoring your structured data with Search Console
To help you monitor and fix your structured data, we’re adding a new course info Rich result report in Search Console. It shows valid and invalid structured data items for pages with course info structured data, and the issues causing items to become invalid. You can use the report to debug, fix, and validate your structured data issues.
Additionally, you can use the Rich result test in Search Console to test the validity of your course info markup by submitting the URL of a page or a code snippet. Using the tool, you can confirm whether or not your markup is valid instantly without waiting for the rich result report to be updated.
We hope this new markup makes it easier for you to show your course information on Google. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us through the Google Search Central Community.