Google’s John Mueller said in a video hangout on Friday that changing your structured data format from microdata to JSON-LD would not lead to many of your pages being removed from the Google index. He said this in response to a complaint about this.

John said this at the 52:39 mark into this past Friday’s hangout. He said changing “from microdata to JSON-LD would not result in pages being dropped from the index.”

The webmaster recently updated his 150 million pages of structured data from using microdata to JSON-LD and noticed 98% of the structured data on Google disappeared and a loss of over 40 million pages indexed in Google. John believes this is a result of some sort of technical issue since Google would not remove indexed pages over a structure data change.

Here is the video embed:

Here is the transcript:

Forum discussion at YouTube.

Note: This story was pre-written and scheduled to be posted now, I am currently offline for a holiday.