Google's John Mueller said in a Google webmaster hangout video at the 34:30 mark that he believes implementing schema markup for rich results won't be getting any easier. In fact, he said over the next few years he feels it will continue to get harder and more complicated.
John said "I think in the future, at least in a near-term future, we will have more types of structured data markup and it will continue to to get more complicated probably." Later on in the video he said "But purely from a markup point of view, I don't see this getting any easier unfortunately."
Why? He said Google will continue to add more types of structured data markup and schema support for new ways to make your site richer in Google search and Google Assistant.
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Here is the transcript:
I think in the future, at least in a near-term future, we will have more types of structured data markup and it will continue to to get more complicated probably. In the sense of they're just lots of requirements for different search features. And in order to do something really fancy in the search results where we can kind of really highlight your your site really well. Or if there's a way to kind of also include information we can show on Google Assistant or rather I guess speak on Google Assistant. Then all of these things they currently rely a lot on structured data markup.So that's something where as these areas expand I would expect to see some amount of additional markup coming in. And anytime you have more structured data markup, kind of like the interactions get trickier and the requirements get it a little bit harder in the sense that oh you have to have, I'm just making something up, like a name with 17 characters, you can't just have a name with 15 characters, sometimes these things change over time.
So I suspect it'll get harder in the near future at least. Maybe in the really long term it'll be like oh the machine intelligence can figure it out for you and you just write a text file and everything else will happen automatically. I don't see that happening in the next couple of years. So if if you're kind of on I don't know the hill with regards to like should I learn more json-ld to figure out how to do markup myself. I think that's a good approach. I also think at the same time a lot of these things can be made easier by content management systems and plugins, extensions that you have for content management systems. So if you're using something like WordPress then maybe there's a plugin that does all of this structure data markup for you automatically.
But purely from a markup point of view, I don't see this getting any easier unfortunately.
So it is probably worthwhile investing in yourself to learn more about schema markup, structured data, rich results and Google Assistant.
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
