When does outdated structured data violate Google's guidelines?

Definition: Outdated structured data violates Google's quality guidance when it describes time-sensitive content that is no longer relevant. Google says it will not show a rich result for such content, and a feature-specific policy can require a stronger action, such as expiring or removing a record.

Key facts

• Google's general structured data policy requires up-to-date information and says that time-sensitive content that is no longer relevant will not receive a rich result. Google's structured data guidelines place this rule under quality guidelines.
• Quality guidelines are not easily tested by an automated tool. A violation can prevent syntactically correct markup from appearing as a rich result or cause it to be marked as spam, according to the same guidelines.
• A job that is no longer open must be expired. Google says that failure to act promptly on expired jobs may result in a manual action. The JobPosting documentation gives the removal choices.
• For an expired job, Google lists a past validThrough date, removing the page so it returns 404 or 410, or removing JobPosting structured data from the page.
• If an event changes status, Google tells site owners to keep its startDate and update eventStatus. The Event documentation also describes how to update dates after a rescheduling.

What counts as outdated information?

Google's general page frames freshness as a relevance requirement. A time-sensitive value becomes a problem when it no longer describes the situation users would encounter, such as a job that is no longer accepting applications or an event whose status has changed. The page does not set a universal age in days. It says that the general rules apply to all structured data and that feature-specific policies add further requirements.

Freshness is separate from syntax. Google's guidelines say that quality rules are not easily tested with an automated tool, and that syntactically correct structured data can still lose rich result eligibility or be marked as spam when a quality rule is violated. Passing a parser or rich result test therefore does not settle whether a date, status, price, or availability value is still current.

What does Google require for jobs?

JobPosting documentation gives the clearest expiry procedure. Google says expired postings are not allowed. If a posting has an expiry date, set validThrough to a date in the past when the job expires. If the job is filled before that date, remove the job posting. The other documented choices are to remove the page entirely, returning 404 or 410, or remove the JobPosting markup.

{
  "@type": "JobPosting",
  "datePosted": "2024-01-18",
  "validThrough": "2024-03-18T00:00"
}

Google also recommends keeping it informed of changes. For job URLs, its documentation recommends the Indexing API because it prompts Googlebot to crawl the page sooner than removing the URL from a sitemap. The same page says that a sitemap is still recommended for coverage of the whole site.

How should event data be updated?

Event markup keeps the event identity fields when the event changes. Google's Event documentation says not to remove startDate when eventStatus changes because it helps identify the unique event. For a cancellation, keep values such as startDate and location, then set the status to EventCancelled.

{
  "@type": "Event",
  "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventCancelled",
  "startDate": "2020-07-21T19:00"
}

For a postponement with no new date, keep the original startDate and use EventPostponed. Once the new date is known, change the status to EventRescheduled and update startDate and endDate. A rescheduled event uses its relevant new dates.

How can you check a stale value?

Inspect the live page and compare each time-sensitive value in the markup with the visible page content and the current offer, schedule, or application state. Google's general guidelines identify the Rich Results Test and URL Inspection tool as technical checks that catch most errors. The Event documentation also says to deploy a few pages, confirm that Google can access them without robots.txt, noindex, or login requirements, and allow several days after publication for Google to find and crawl the page.

Related terms

• Structured data
• JSON-LD
• How do I mark a postponed event in structured data?
• How do I remove an expired job from Google's job results?

FAQ

Does valid JSON make stale structured data acceptable?

No. You can have syntactically correct markup that still fails Google's quality guidance when its time-sensitive content is no longer relevant.

What should you do when an event is postponed?

Keep the original startDate while the new date is unknown, then update eventStatus, startDate, and endDate when the new schedule is known.

Does Google publish one expiry period for every structured data type?

Google's general guideline uses relevance and does not publish one universal number of days. Feature documentation can set a specific rule, such as a past validThrough value for an expired job.

Sources

1. Google Search Central, "General Structured Data Guidelines", 2026-07-10
2. Google Search Central, "Event structured data", 2026-09-08
3. Google Search Central, "Job posting structured data for Job Search", 2026-09-08

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