Help with Schema & what's considered "Spammy structured markup"
-
Hello all!
I was wondering if someone with a good understanding of schema markup could please answer my question about the correct use so I can correct a penalty I just received.
My website is using the following schema markup for our reviews and today I received this message in my search console. UGH...
Manual Actions
This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Site-wide matches Some manual actions apply to entire site
<colgroup><col class="JX0GPIC-d-h"><col class="JX0GPIC-d-x"><col class="JX0GPIC-d-a"></colgroup>
| | Reason | Affects |
| |Spammy structured markup
Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google's Rich Snippet Quality guidelines. Learn more. |
I have used the webmasters rich snippets tool but everything checks out. The only thing I could think of is my schema tag for "product." rather than using a company like tag? (https://schema.org/Corporation). We are a mortgage company so we sell a product it's called a mortgage so I assumed product would be appropriate.
Could that even be the issue? I checked another site that uses a similar markup and they don't seem to have any problems in SERPS. http://www.fha.com/fha_reverse shows stars and they call their reviews "store"
OR could it be that I added my reviews in my footer so that each of my pages would have a chance at displaying my stars?
All our reviews are independently verified and we just would like to showcase them. I greatly appreciate the feedback and had no intentions of abusing the markup.
From my site:
All Reverse Mortgage 4.9 out of 5 301 Verified Customer Reviews from eKomi
| |
| | [https://www.ekomi-us.com/review-reverse.mortgage.html](<a class=)" rel="nofollow" title="eKomi verified customer reviews" target="_BLANK" style="text-decoration:none; font-size:1.1em;"> |
| | ![](<a class=)imgs/rating-bar5.png" /> |
| | |
| | All Reverse Mortgage |
| | |
| | |
| | 4.9 out of 5 |
| | 301 Verified Customer Reviews from eKomi |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | | -
No problem Cliff. I hope you found it helpful, and I'm happy to hear this has been cleared up for you. It's something I'll keep in mind if anyone else has a similar issue.
-
Welp! I just received an approval to my reconsideration request. So it turns out it is not wise to create a sitewide schema markup for your companies ratings. I guess each page should have its own unique markup and organization ratings belong on one page only.
Thank you guys for looking into this and giving me your feedback. -Cliff
-
I'm sorry to hear that and can understand your frustration. Sometimes the way Google treats legitimate businesses in certain hyper-competitive industries is unfortunate. You're guilty until proven innocent.
I did not see anything wrong with your code. Maybe the manual reviewer didn't clear their cache? Maybe they were looking at a different URL than me, which still had the product schema without a buy button. Aggregate rating is clearly documented as being compatible with the Organization Schema type, and is described as "The overall rating, based on a collection of reviews or ratings, of the item."
If this were my site the next thing I would try is removing the Schema from every page except your home page. Maybe someone else has experienced this first-hand and will respond with a more helpful answer.
-
Well I changed to organization after I received the notice of penalty and then after correcting my site I asked for a reconsideration and was denied stating that site still apears to be outside of webmaster guidelines with some type of spammy schema markup.
At a total loss. Schema markup produces no errors in testing against Google's rich snippet tool and the tag is no longer product.
-
Ain't that the truth.
A good rule of thumb might be: If there's a BUY button that adds an item on that page to a shopping cart, use Product schema on that page. If that buy button is on every page of your site for the same product, it's going to seam suspicious coming from anyone but a household brand.
-
Of course they show my stars on the adwords network no problem! Lol
-
Thank you so much for your feedback!
I changed my markup to organization rather than product and then asked for a reconsideration and was turned down without any specific reason except to refer to the Webmaster guidelines.
So I'm at a loss... Thankfully none of my rankings have moved but I am afraid I will never be able to show my reviews again.
-
I had it set before to product and then made the change to Organization
My markup is below. Then, I asked for a reconsideration stating I was unaware of the difference and showed that I made the change to Organization they denied my reconsideration. I am absolutely in the dark on this because the response is simply to refer to Webmaster guidelines and they don't give anything specific to what I am doing wrong to receive this manual penalty. I'm not completely panicking because my SERP rankings have not been affected by this but I am worried that I'll never be able to show review stars again.
| |
| | ![](<a class=)imgs/rating-bar5.png" style="vertical-align:middle;" /> |
| | [https://www.ekomi-us.com/review-reverse.mortgage.html](<a class=)" rel="nofollow" title="eKomi verified customer reviews" target="_BLANK" style="text-decoration:none; font-size:1.1em;"> |
| | |
| | All Reverse Mortgage |
| | |
| | |
| | 4.9 out of 5 |
| | 301 Verified Customer Reviews from eKomi |
| | | -
How do you know that wasn't it? I'm just curious so I can learn from it.
If you're using organization Schema, it should be OK to show on every page. If you're using Product schema it should only show on a page where they can buy the product.
-
Thanks for your feedback! Turns out that wasn't it. I wonder, could having this in a footer of my site which is trying to show ratings on all pages of my site considered to be the spammy part?
To: Webmaster of <a target="_blank">https://reverse.mortgage/</a>,
Google has reviewed your site in response to your reconsideration request. Based on this review, Google believes that your site still violates Google Webmaster Guidelines. To resolve all manual actions, review your site again, correct the necessary items, and file another reconsideration request.
How to fix this problem:
| 1 |
Review the violations on your site
Use the Manual Actions Viewer to identify what manual actions are applied to your site.
Fix any issues listed
Use the details in the Manual Actions Viewer to help you fix outstanding issues. If your site was hacked, use Security Issues to find more details.
|
| 3 |Submit a reconsideration request
Include any details or documentation that can help us understand the changes made to your site.
|
-
I think it may have to do, as you guessed, with the use of Product schema. You should try Organization schema. If you have an actual product landing page, with a price and Add to Cart button, that would be where you would put the Product schema, but only put reviews about the actual reverse mortgage product. Most of the reviews on the home page seem to be about the company as a whole.
-
I don't know the answer to your question. However, I can say that LOTS of sites have lost their review stars triggered by schema in the past couple of months. For some sites the stars "just disappeared" and other sites received "manual spam penalty" messages from Google with language similar to what you posted above.
Some companies who offer the review services are not helpful when contacted directly and asked what to do about the problem... and Google's response to reconsideration requests often contain no explicit information.
You are not alone. Google seems to think that webmasters should be able to divine meaning from their messages.
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
-
What's more valuable, a Blog or a Forum, and how to integrate?
We want to start a blog or forum (maybe eventually both) and are unsure what is the best way to publish it from an SEO standpoint. If the blog is published on our domain, like domain.com/blog then that obviously helps the site but if the base site is a for-profit business wouldn't it get less credibility, eyeballs, links as opposed to if you started the blog as it's own separate community on a separate domain and then just strategically linked to the for profit site (sponsorship links)? Essentially the question is, if I'm the Lucky Soday Company, do I start a Blog on the Lucky Soda website, or do I start a separate website to grow a soft drink enthusiast community blog / forum? I would guess a blog has more SEO potential than a discussion forum?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MrSem0 -
Is Chamber of Commerce membership a "paid" link, breaking Google's rules?
Hi guys, This drives me nuts. I hear all the time that any time value is exchanged for a link that it technically violates Google's guidelines. What about real organizations, chambers of commerce, trade groups, etc. that you are a part of that have online directories with DO-follow links. On one hand people will say these are great links with real value outside of search and great for local SEO..and on the other hand some hardliners are saying that these technically should be no-follow. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Should you allow an auto dealer's inventory to be indexed?
Due to the way most auto dealership website populate inventory pages, should you allow inventory to be indexed at all? The main benefit us more content. The problem is it creates duplicate, or near duplicate content. It also creates a ton of crawl errors since the turnover is so short and fast. I would love some help on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gauge1230 -
Is it a good or bad idea (in Google's eyes) to add a forum to my website?
I have an active website with many users adding dozens of comments on the many pages of the site daily. I'm am wondering if it would be good for the overall ranking strength of the site if I were to add a forum to it (in a subdirectory, like forum.mysite.com). On one hand, I can see the forum posts as thin content, which Google wouldn't care for. On the other hand, I see the additional user engagement on the site, which I think Google would like. I know the benefits it can have to the users, but for this question, all I want to know is if this would be seen by Google as a plus or a minus for my site, assuming the forum succeeded in becoming popular. I don't want to do anything that will diminish the value of my site in Google's eyes. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Could this be seen as duplicate content in Google's eyes?
Hi I'm an in-house SEO and we've recently seen Panda related traffic loss along with some of our main keywords slipping down the SERPs. Looking for possible Panda related issues I was wondering if the following could be seen as duplicate content. We've got some very similar holidays (travel company) on our website. While they are different I'm concerned it may be seen as creating content that is too similar: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/the-wildlife-and-beaches-of-kenya.aspx http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/ultimate-kenya-wildlife-and-beaches.aspx http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/wildlife-and-beach-family-safari.aspx They do all have unique text but as you can see from the titles, they are very similar (note from an SEO point of view the tabbed content is all within the same page at source level). At the top level of the holiday pages we have a filtered search:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays.aspx These pages have a unique introduction but the content snippets being pulled into the boxes is drawn from each of the individual holiday pages. I'm just concerned that these could be introducing some duplicating issues. Any thoughts?0 -
"Starting Over" With A New Domain & 301 Redirect
Hello, SEO Gurus. A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual). Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam. She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok. Here's my question: If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2). Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?" I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Is there any negative SEO effect of having comma's in URL's?
Hello, I have a client who has a large ecommerce website. Some category names have been created with comma's in - which has meant that their software has automatically generated URL's with comma's in for every page that comes beneath the category in the site hierarchy. eg. 1 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/ eg. 2 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/action-and-adventure/ etc... I know that URL's with comma's in look a bit ugly! But is there 'any' SEO reason why URL's with comma's in are any less effective? Kind Regs, RB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichBestSEO0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0