Schema Markup Errors - Priority or Not?
-
Greetings All...
I've been digging through the search console on a few of my sites and I've been noticing quite a few structured data errors. Most of the errors are related to: hcard, hentry and hatom. Most of them are missing author & entry-title, while the other one is missing: fn.
I recently saw an article on SEL about Google's focus on spammy mark-up. The sites I use are built and managed by vendors, so I would have to impress upon them the impact of these errors and have them prioritize, then fix them.
My question is whether or not this should be prioritized? Should I have them correct these errors sooner than later or can I take a phased approach? I haven't noticed any loss in traffic or anything like that, I'm more focused on what negative impact a "phased approach" could have.
Any thoughts?
-
In that case I would say a phased approach would be fine. It is an issue that should be addressed, but I wouldn't classify it as "critical".
-
Thanks for the responses.
These changes will be managed by the developers, so it won't impact any other priorities that I have in the queue. My concern was whether this was pressing enough that I would have to push the developer towards a hard timeline vs a more phased one. I took a look at other clients on this platform and saw the same errors. So, this may be a platform wide markup error.
These are automotive clients, so their sites are OEM mandated. Therefore, I don't have any say in the types of markup they use. But, my goal is to impress upon them the fact that these errors could definitely negatively impact my clients (if not now, in the future).
-
I think it depends on what else you have in the queue for your clients. Without knowing what other priorities you have, I can't say whether this is more or less important. However, as Patrick said, correct markup helps search engines understand more about the context of what's on the page. It probably won't make a big ranking impact, and I doubt you're going to get penalized for some markup errors as long as you're not trying to spam using markup.
I definitely prefer Schema.org markup over Hcard, but rather than implementing it as per Schema.org you may want to consider JSON-LD - https://developers.google.com/schemas/formats/json-ld .
-
Hi there
Yes, I would consider this a priority as you want to have the most upto date and relevant markup on your site, so that crawlers can better understand your important information and attribute the right properties to your site/content.
I would also focus on Schema, as it's recognized by major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex, so you are pleasing multiple crawlers at once. Pages that have this markup also tend to rank four positions higher than pages without. So it is definitely worth the investment of time.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Homepage not ranking main keywords - structure error?
Dear, Moz community We have an issue. We have a classified advertisement website. Our website is built like this**homepage (**Optimized for main keyword, has latest listings from all categories ) - category 1 (we did not want to add alteration of the keyword we want to rank homepage, as we thought this would "compete" with homepage) - category 2 - category 3 - **category **4 The listing URLs look like this www.example.com/categoryname/listingname Now the issue is that the homepage is not ranking at all for the main keywords. When we used URL structure like this "example.com/main-keyword-listing-id" homepage was ranking (other sites). Now with new site we used the best practice and added url's as described above (/categoryname/listingid).This caused our homepage not to rank at all for the main keywords.What did we do wrong? We want our homepage to rank for the main keyword and categories for theirs. Should we 1. Change the category 1 name to main keyword (maybe some long tail) so we have the main keyword in URLs? So at least one of the main categories has the main keyword in the listing URLs2. Should we change the category listing urls all back to /main-keyword-listing-id? We thought that this was a bit spammy, so that´s why we used categories. _This means that all listings have same URL name and not best for ranking cateogries_3. Just link back to homepage internally with the main keyword and google should catch that? _Currently in menu you go to homepage clicking HOME but we can add for example our main keyword there - Latest car advertisements _I would be happy of any feedback.
Technical SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
The use of Markup language
Hi, We were thinking of adding markup language to our site. We have been reading about it to understand the actual benefits of doing so (we have seen many brands are not using it, including moz.com). So I have two questions: 1- Would you recommend using it for our site? www.memoq.com 2- If yes, would it be better to create a snippet of code for our home page as an "organization" and then different snippets for our product pages as "products". Looking forward to your comments,
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Product Schema implementation
Hi Once you have added structured data to a web page, say adding 'product schema' to a product page how long can you reasonably expect before it take effects, ie. displays rich snippets ? Also in the case of product schema what triggers the display of the rich snippet ? is it a branded keyword and product title search or just a product title search or can it result from a generic keyword search too ? All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Seomoz pages error
Hi
Technical SEO | | looktouchfeel
I have a problem with seomoz, it is saying my website http://www.clearviewtraffic.com has page errors on 19,680 pages. Most of the errors are for duplicate page titles. The website itself doesn't even have 100 pages. Does anyone know how I can fix this? Thanks Luke0 -
My 404 page shows in the report as an error.
How can i make my actual 404 page not show up as a 404 error in the report?
Technical SEO | | LindseyNewman0 -
What to do about Google Crawl Error due to Faceted Navigation?
We are getting many crawl errors listed in Google webmaster tools. We use some faceted navigation with several variables. Google sees these as "500" response code. It looks like Google is truncating the url. Can we tell Google not to crawl these search results using part of the url ("sort=" for example)? Is there a better way to solve this?
Technical SEO | | EugeneF0 -
Microformats & Schema.org query
Just finished watching the Microformats & Schema.org webinar (thanks for a good presentation Richard) and picked up some interesting tips. It did get me thinking about ways I could use them with a couple of ecommerce sites I am working on. At present there are no reviews on the page so cannot add that tag, however the product pages have a facebook like and a tweet option so maybe I could add a tag based around that? Another one I am considering is putting the sizes of the items in one 'available in sizes 12-32' for example as women often ponder if a store will have it in their size. I guess my question is, would these ways of using it be considered too spammy. I note the webinar state using microformats can be useful but there is a risk if they are too spammy etc. Any opinions would be most welcome, Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Implementing Schema within Existing CSS tags
In implementing Schema with a site using CSS and containing existing tags, I want to be sure that we are (#1) using the tags effectively when used within a product detail template and (#2) not actually harming ourselves by telling Google that all products are named or described by the SS tag and not actually the product name or description (which obviously could be disasterous). An example of what we are looking at implementing is the following: Old: <ss:value source="$product.name"></ss:value> New: <ss:value source="$product.name"></ss:value> Old: <ss:value source="$product.description">New: <ss:value source="$product.description"></ss:value> Basically, is Schema at the point where the SS tag be replaced (in the eyes of the search engines) with the actual text and not the tag itself?</ss:value>
Technical SEO | | TechMama0