Google announced the deprecation of the Structured Data Testing tool in July last year, after its Rich Results Test Tool was released out of beta.
The news was met with dismay by SEOs and it seems Google has taken note, announcing that it will be migrated instead, to schema.org.
“We're refocusing the Structured Data Testing Tool and migrating it to a new domain serving the schema.org community by April 2021.”
Source: Google
Google said the main purpose of the tool would be to check syntax and compliance of markup with schema.org standards.
Going forward, it will no longer check for Google Search rich results types. To test markup for Google Search rich result types, Google says you should continue to use the Rich Results Test tool.
Request Indexing
The Request Indexing feature has been unavailable since 14 October when Google tweeted that it was being disabled “to make some infrastructure changes”. At that point Google said it expected it to be available “in the coming weeks”, but in fact it was just before Christmas when its return was announced.
Source: Google
Google had said normal crawling and indexing would not be affected while the feature was unavailable. However it was much missed by SEOs as it’s a handy way of pushing content to Google, for new or updated urls.
In its tweet annoucing the feature's renewed availability, Google also reminded users that for large numbers of urls you should submit a sitemap rather than requesting indexing via Search Console.
Also, requesting indexing does not guarantee inclusion in Google’s index. “Our systems prioritize the fast inclusion of high quality, useful content.”
