Google is rolling out a new type of structured data to help movies appear in new dedicated movie carousels.
Earlier today, Google announced a brand new search experience for movies and TV shows. Shortly afterward came the announcement of this new structured data.
📽"You can't handle the markup!"🍿There's new structured data documentation for Movie carousels 🎬: https://t.co/JU6iGtPi5x
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) September 5, 2019
Now, when people in the US search for phrases like “what to watch” or “80s horror movies” on their mobile device, they’ll be presented with carousels of recommendations.
Google’s new structured data for movies is designed to help ensure relevant titles appears in the new carousels.
In order for a movie to be eligible to display in a carousel, only the title of the movie and an accompanying image need to be defined using structured data.
However, providing more data than what’s required will help Google understand the entity better, which can help it to show up for more generic searches.
Here’s a list of the required and recommended structured data properties:
- An image that represents the movie (required)
- The name of the movie (required)
- An annotation for the average review score assigned to the movie (recommended/optional)
- The date the movie was released (recommended/optional)
- The director of the movie (recommended/optional)
- A nested review of the movie (recommended/optional)
Google provides examples of the exact markup required in its new developer document.
You can also see the full definition of the ‘Movie’ entity over at Schema.org where there’s information on defining dozens of other properties related to a movie.
I can see this structured data being especially useful for independent production companies who may otherwise have difficulty getting their movies surfaced among titles released by major studios.
