Week 33 of 2020 included some very important news for web developers and WordPress users (WordPress 5.5 named “Eckstine”), but also Article markup testing in Rich Results.
1. The release of WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine”
The official release of WordPress version 5.5 called “Eckstine” was big news among web developers and CMS managers around the world. It brought improvements to the block editor by adding block patterns and the new block directory.
Also, now images now can be edited inline including rotation, resizing cropping, without accessing the media library.
Another long waited future is the WordPress native lazy loading, which makes pages load faster by loading each image as it comes into viewing range. This feature will make lazy loading plug-ins to become obsolete.
Another important update is the automated updates for plug-ins which you can enable yourself in the plugins menu.
For SEO it’s important that now WordPress generates its own XML sitemap (at URL /wp-sitemap.xml), which allows search engine crawlers to discover instantly the newest published posts and pages. In case you use Yoast SEO or RankMath SEO plugins, don’t worry: the default XML site map of WordPress is disabled by the respective plugin you use.
2. Article markup can be checked in Rich Results test tool
Article structured data is very useful especially for companies using WordPress platforms and for which content marketing is important. By setting up this feature, websites can record higher positions in SERP.
We are happy to announce support for Article structured data in the Rich Results Test tool. Read more about the markup in our developer documentation https://t.co/8osWelZNwu or test your pages at https://t.co/AGp8xwSsDK pic.twitter.com/YjuomwwnMl
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) August 10, 2020
In case you want to check whether Google crawlers picked this markup from your pages, you can use for free Rich Results Test Tool.
Rich Results tool in action: Analyzing Neil Patel’s blog post
The article markup usage isn’t yet widespread, because for many top publishers other markups are more important:
- AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject (embedded non-text objects)
- Event
- Organization / Person
- LocalBusiness
- Product / Offers
- Reviews
- Podcasts
- and more
Now let’s see this tool in action by checking a recent blog post published by Neil Patel, probably the most prominent American SEO specialist.
As we see from the picture below, the Rich Results tool identified only Breadcrumbs and Sitelinks searchbox as Rich items (so no Article markup), but it also reports a few Page loading issues (mostly related to JavaScript).
