John Mueller made the comment on Google+ that along with the new support for JSON-LD in products and snippets, they have “cleaned up some of the application logic.”
Along with the launch of support for JSON-LD for Reviews and Products structured data markup, we’ve cleaned up some of our application logic. For example, requirements for explicit reviewed item and correct property name values are now enforced. Check your markup in the Structured Data Testing Tool ( https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ ) and Search Console Structured Data Dashboard ( https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2650907 ) to see if your site is impacted by these changes. For more information about how to format Reviews and Products markup to comply with Google’s validation rules, see the documentation at https://developers.google.com/structured-data/
We hope these changes make it easier to use structured data on your side!
He doesn’t detail all the changes, but it would be worth checking both the dashboard as well as running a few pages through the structured data testing tool to see if any issues pop up. If you have been following the markup properly, there shouldn’t be any issues, but particularly if you have been using a WordPress plugin or other “make it easy” tool, there might be errors you weren’t aware of that will now be problematic.
It is always a good practice to regularly check your structured data dashboard in Search Console so you can always fix issues as they pop up. And there is a related spammy structured markup manual action that will prevent your markup from showing in the search results until it is resolved – this is another area where some WordPress plugins have triggered manual actions, particularly recipe schema plugins.
Jennifer Slegg
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