Structured data issues can affect how your site’s content appears in search results. This guide provides a step-by-step approach to identify, fix, and validate these issues in Search Console.
Fix and validate your structured data
The rich result report provides tools to identify and address structured data issues for specific search result types. Each issue is detailed on a landing page, with filtered data available for individual issues. Follow these steps to fix, debug, and validate problems.
Fix and validate issues
- Find and fix issues:
- Open the rich result report and click an issue to see affected pages.
- Use the Why items are invalid table to select issues.
- Focus on fixing a specific issue across all relevant URLs before addressing others.
- If the issue stems from a template error, fixing the template will resolve all associated pages.
- Upload and verify fixes:
- Update your site with the corrections, ensuring all impacted pages are fixed.
- Ensure pages are accessible for crawling (not blocked by
robots.txtornoindex). - Inspect individual pages using Test live URL in the URL Inspection tool to confirm fixes.
- Validate your fixes:
- After confirming the fixes, click Validate fix on the issue’s details page to start Google’s validation process.
- Google will initially check a sample of pages. If they pass, it will proceed to validate other affected pages.
Recommended debugging tools
- Rich Results Test: Use this tool to test structured data on live or draft pages.
- URL Inspection tool: View structured data errors and verify fixes for both indexed and live versions.
Monitor validation progress
Validation can take two weeks or more, depending on crawl frequency. Track validation status and see a log of checked URLs on the issue details page.
If validation fails, identify failed URLs, fix the issues, and restart validation. Pending or failed URLs, as well as new instances, will resume validation during the next attempt.
Validation states
Each issue and instance is assigned a validation state:
| State | Description | Next steps |
|---|---|---|
| Not started | No prior validation attempts. |
|
| Started | Validation is in progress. | Google will notify you of progress. |
| Looking good | Checked instances are passing so far. | Continue monitoring until validation completes. |
| Passed | All known instances are resolved. | No further action needed. |
| Failed | Issues remain on some URLs. | Fix the remaining issues and restart validation. |
| N/A | The issue was fixed without a validation attempt. | No further action needed. |
Revalidation
If validation fails, wait for the current cycle to finish before starting another. Restart validation for failed or pending URLs and any new instances detected since the last attempt.
Issue lifetime
An issue remains active until 90 days pass without new instances. If a new instance appears after 90 days, it is treated as a new issue.
- The First detected date reflects the original detection date and does not reset.
- A recurring issue within 90 days maintains its original detection date.
- An issue resurfacing after 91 days is recorded as a new issue.
Why validate?
Validating fixes ensures:
- Confirmation that your fixes work.
- Expedites Google's review and re-crawling of affected pages.
- Email notifications for successful fixes or remaining issues.
- A clear log of validation progress and fix status for each URL.
Validation process overview
- Google immediately checks a sample of pages upon clicking Validate fix.
- If the error persists, validation stops; otherwise, the process continues.
- Affected URLs are queued for recrawling, with progress logged in the validation history.
- Validation concludes when all instances are fixed or flagged as Other.
