Guides
What the things our tools check actually mean, and what to do when one of them says something is wrong. Every guide ends with the tool that performs the check.
FAQ structured data in 2026: what still works, and for whom
Since August 2023, FAQ rich results appear only for well-known authoritative government and health sites. The markup is still valid and still read — but most sites should write FAQs for readers, not for a rich result that is not coming.
Read the guide- SEO3 min read
Video structured data: the checklist for video results
VideoObject markup needs four properties before Google will show a video result at all — and the commonest failure is not the markup but a thumbnail the crawler is not allowed to fetch.
13 September 2026 - SEO3 min read
Recipe structured data: the checklist for recipe snippets
Recipe is the most demanding everyday rich result: four required properties, including ingredients as a list and instructions as steps. Getting the shapes right matters as much as the properties.
13 September 2026 - SEO3 min read
Event structured data: the checklist for event listings
Event markup needs a name, a start date with a timezone, and a location — physical or virtual. The properties Google recommends are the ones that stop a cancelled or online event being advertised wrongly.
13 September 2026 - SEO3 min read
Local business structured data: the listing checklist
A local business listing needs a name and a real, structured address — and benefits from hours a parser can read, coordinates a geocoder cannot get wrong, and the most specific business type that fits.
13 September 2026 - SEO3 min read
Product structured data: the checklist for product rich results
Product markup has one required property and one unwritten rule: without an offer, a review or a rating, there is nothing for Google to show. The checklist covers both, and the merchant listing extras.
13 September 2026 - SEO3 min read
Job posting structured data: the Google Jobs checklist
Google Jobs is the one rich result with five required properties — and a sixth, validThrough, that Google's documentation lists as recommended but treats as the difference between a trusted feed and a stale one.
13 September 2026 - SEO3 min read
Article structured data: the checklist for blog posts and guides
Article markup is the easiest structured data to get right — one required property — and still worth doing carefully, because the recommended ones are what earn the enhanced result.
13 September 2026 - SEO3 min read
News article structured data: the checklist for Top stories
What a news story's markup needs for the Article rich result and Top stories eligibility: one required property, four that decide how the result looks, and the dates that must tell the truth.
13 September 2026 - SEO4 min read
Title tags and meta descriptions that earn the click
One of these two is a ranking signal and one is not — but both decide whether anyone clicks. Google rewrites a large share of them, and the reasons it does are consistent enough to work with.
17 August 2026 - SEO4 min read
301, 302, and the redirect chains that quietly cost you
Choosing between 301 and 302 matters less than people think. What the address bar never shows you — how many hops happen before the page arrives — matters far more.
17 August 2026 - SEO4 min read
What a canonical tag actually does, and when Google ignores it
A canonical tag is a hint, not an instruction. Understanding that one distinction explains almost every case where the URL you nominated is not the URL that ends up in search results.
17 August 2026 
SEO4 min readWhat robots.txt is for, and the four mistakes that cost people traffic
robots.txt controls what crawlers may request — not what appears in search results. Confusing those two is the most expensive mistake in the file, and it is the easiest one to make.
17 August 2026