Introducing a new way for sites to highlight COVID-19 announcements on Google Search

Published on 05/06/2020 – Last Updated on 05/06/2020 by OTC

How to implement your COVID-19 announcements

There are two ways that you can implement your COVID-19 announcements.

RECOMMENDED: Add structured data to your web page

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. We recommend using this method because it is the easiest way for us to take in this information, it enables reporting through Search Console in the future, and enables you to make updates. Learn how to add structured data to COVID-19 announcements.

ALTERNATIVE: Submit announcements in Search Console

If you don’t have the technical ability or support to implement structured data, you can submit a COVID-19 announcement in Search Console. This tool is still in beta testing, and you may see changes.

This method is not preferred and is intended only as a short-term solution. With structured data, your announcement highlights can automatically update when your pages change. With the tool, you’ll have to manually update announcements. Also, announcements made this way cannot be monitored through special reporting that will be made available through Search Console in the future.

If you do need to submit this way, you’ll need to first be verified in Search Console. Then you can submit a COVID-19 announcement:

More COVID-19 resources for sites from Google Search

Beyond special announcements markup, there are other ways you can highlight other types of activities that may be impacted because of COVID-19:

• Best practices for health and government sites: If you are a representative of a health or government website, and you have important information about coronavirus for the general public, here are some recommendations for how to make this information more visible on Google Search.
• Surface your common FAQs: If your site has common FAQs, adding FAQ markup can help Google Search surface your answers.
• Pausing your business online: See our blog post on how to pause your business online in a way that minimizes impacts with Google Search.
• Business hours & temporary closures: Review the guidance from Google My Business on how to change your business hours or indicate temporary closures or how to create COVID-19 posts.
• Events: If you hold events, look over the new properties for marking them virtual, postponed, or canceled.
• Knowledge Panels: Understand how to recommend changes to your Google knowledge panel (or how to claim it, if you haven’t already).
• Fix an overloaded server: Learn how to determine a server’s bottleneck, quickly fix the bottleneck, improve server performance, and prevent regressions.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know on Twitter.

Posted by Lizzi Harvey, Technical Writer, Search Relations, and Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search