How To Remove Data-Vocabulary Schema.org | Structured Data

Structured data schemas such as schema.org and data-vocabulary.org are used to define shared meaningful structures for markup-based applications on the Web. With the increasing usage and popularity of schema.org, we decided to focus our development on a single SD scheme. As of April 6, 2020, data-vocabulary.org markup will no longer be eligible for Google rich result features.

As a preparation for the change and starting today, Search Console will issue warnings for pages using the data-vocabulary.org schema so that you can prepare for the sunset in time. This will allow you to easily identify pages using that markup and replace the data-vocabulary.org markup with schema.org.

A bit more about structured data 

Google uses structured data standardized formats and shared schemas to provide information about a page and the things described by the page. This information is used for two main purposes

• Understand the content of the page
• Enable special search result features and enhancements 

What are structured data formats? 

Structured data formats like JSON-LD, RDFa, and Microdata define a small number of fixed structures that can be used to encode descriptive data. They typically build upon lower-level standards like JSON and HTML. To learn more about the supported and recommended formats, please check out our developer’s guide.

What is structured data schemas?

Alongside the structured data formats, structured data schemas work like a kind of dictionary, defining terms for types of things (e.g. "Person", "Event", "Organization"), and for properties and relationships (e.g. "name", "worksFor"). By maintaining this separation between format and schema, it is possible for users of different formats to take advantage of the same, widely shared, schemas.

Data-vocabulary schema

Google's "Data Vocabulary" project was an important milestone in the development of structured data on the Web because it led to our collaboration with other search engines to create schema.org. However, it is now very outdated and it is generally preferable to use more widely shared vocabulary from Schema.org. Therefore data-vocabulary.org markup will stop being eligible for Google search result features and enhancements.

Please note that this is the only consequence of this change. Pages using data-vocabulary schema will remain valid for all other purposes.

In order to be eligible for Google rich result features, we recommend converting your data-vocabulary.org structured data to schema.org.

Let’s look at how to convert to schema.org from data-vocabulary.org

Google, as preparation for this, has issued warnings in Google Search Console for the pages using data-vocabulary.org schemas. This warning will help webmasters to easily identify the pages with outdated data-vocabulary.org schemas so that they can convert them into schema.org.

Let’s look at an example to understand better how to convert to the schema.org.

Breadcrumbs with data-vocabulary. org schema

This will show the below error in Search Console

Update to schema.org

Test this on Google Search Console 

See it’s error-free now
Once the code is validated, you can update the code on your website and test it again in the structured data testing tool in Google Search Console and submit it to Google for recrawling.

You can test any code snippet live on the Rich Results Test by pasting it into the search box. Try it out! And if you have any questions or comments, check out the Google Webmasters community.