Creative Director
Randy Oest is an avid Star Trek fan, plays too many board games, and bought his mother an iPad so that he wouldn’t have to fix her computer anymore.
April 8, 2020
With the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, many universities and businesses are working to communicate important and timely coronavirus-related information that impacts our everyday lives. To help highlight these announcements, Google has introduced Special Announcement structured data that can be added to web pages or in Search Console
How does it appear in search?
When SpecialAnnouncement structured data is added to a page, a COVID-19 announcement rich result will be displayed alongside the page’s regular snippet description. This announcement can contain a short summary that can be expanded to view more. Google is actively working on this feature, so the format may change over time and you may not see results in Google Search right away.
How to add structured data to COVID-19 announcements to your webpage
Google has developed a learning environment, Codelab, to teach you how to add structured data to your webpages. Google’s preferred format for structured data is a JavaScript-oriented object notation, JSON-LD.
- You will need to define the script in the
<head>or<body>tags of all pages that you will have structured data. - Then within the script you inform Google that you will be using the schema.org structured data by setting
@contextto http://schema.org. - Next define the content that you are describing by setting @type to one of the main content types within schema.org. Example content types include:
Event,Organization,Person,Place, (LocalBusiness,Restaurant, etc.)Product, (such as anOffer). And nowSpecialAnnouncement. - Each type will have its own required and suggested properties that you will define. For example
SpecialAnnouncementproperties include:announcementLocation,schoolClosuresInfo, andnewsUpdatesAndGuidelines. You can see all of the required and suggested properties forSpecialAnnouncement. - Besides the new properties for
SpecialAnnouncement, just like all other structure data, you can combine properties from other types. For example fromThingyou can addDescription,Image, andURL.
After adding all required and suggested properties, you can validate your structure with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
Example: School closure announcement
<html>
<head>
<title>COVID-19 School Announcements</title>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{rn "@context": "https://schema.org",rn "@type": "SpecialAnnouncement",rn "name": "COVID-19 School Announcements",rn "text": "All schools will remain closed through a minimum of May 1 in alignment with schooldistricts across all Bay Area counties.",rn "datePosted": "2020-03-17T08:00",rn "expires": "2020-03-24T23:59",rn "category": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q81068910",rn "schoolClosuresInfo": "https://example-school-district.org/announcements/extended-closure-notice",rn "announcementLocation": {rn "@type": "CivicStructure",rn "name": "Example School",rn "url": "https://example-school.org/",rn "address": {rn "@type": "PostalAddress",rn "streetAddress": "123 West Chestnut Drive",rn "addressLocality": "Palo Alto",rn "postalCode": "13478",rn "addressRegion": "CA",rn "addressCountry": "US"
}
}
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Submit COVID-19 announcements in Search Console
If you don’t have the technical ability or support to implement structured data, you can submit a COVID-19 announcement in Search Console. This tool is still in beta testing, and you may see changes
Using Search Console for this is only a short-term solution and requires manual updates, so you will want to be working on implementing structured data into your web site so that the information will be always up-to-date
If you do need to submit this way, you’ll need to first be verified in Search Console. Then you can submit a COVID-19 announcement
Making the web a better place to teach, learn, and advocate starts here...
When you subscribe to our newsletter!