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
-
Sitemap error in Webmaster tools - 409 error (conflict)
Hey guys, I'm getting this weird error when I submit my sitemap to Google. It says I'm getting a 409 error in my post-sitemap.xml file (https://cleargear.com/post-sitemap.xml). But when I check it, it looks totally fine. I am using YoastSEO to generate the sitemap.xml file. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this a big deal? If so, Does anyone know how to fix? Thanks EwTswL4
Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian0 -
Spammy Structured Data Markup Removal
Hi There, I'm in a weird situation and I am wondering if you can help me. Here we go, We had some of our developers implement structured data markup on our site, and they obviously did not know what they were doing. They messed up our results in the SERP big time and we wound up getting manually penalized for it. We removed those markups and got rid of that penalty (phew), however now we are still stuck with two issues. We had some pages that we changed their URLs, so the old URLs are now dead pages getting redirected to the newer version of the same old page, however, two things now happened: a) for some reason two of the old dead pages still come up in the Google SERP, even though it's over six weeks since we changed the URLs. We made sure that we aren't linking to the old version of the url anywhere from our site. b) those two old URLs are showing up in the SERP with the old spammy markup. We don't have anywhere to remove the markup from cause there are no such pages anymore so obviously there isn't this markup code anywhere anymore. We need a solution for getting the markup out of the SERP. We thought of one idea that might help - create new pages for those old URLs, and make sure that there is nothing spammy in there, and we should tell google not to index these pages - hopefully, that will get Google to de-index those pages. Is this a good idea, if yes, is there anything I should know about, or watch out for? Or do you have a better one for me? Thanks so much
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
To avoid errors in our Moz crawl, we removed subdomains from our host. (First we tried 301 redirects, also listed as errors.) Now we have backlinks all over the web that are broken. How bad is this, from a pagerank standpoint?
Our MOZ crawl kept telling us we had duplicate page content even though our subdomains were redirected to our main site. (Pages from Wineracks.vigilantinc.com were 301 redirected to vigilantinc.com/wineracks.) Now, to solve that problem, we have removed the wineracks.vigilantinc.com subdomain. The error report is better, but now we have broken backlinks - thousands of them. Is this hurting us worse than the duplicate content problem?
Technical SEO | | KristyFord0 -
Odd 404 Errors in WP That I cannot find the origin
Hello Everyone, I have a really odd error that I cannot figure out how to fix. I keep getting a 404 error (through google webmaster tools, and SEOmoz) at this url http://www.cio-tech.com/cios-oracle-optimization-results-roi-justification-save-20m-over-5-years/www.SynSynAck.com... I am not even too sure how this link originated because the first part is a URL to a blog post, and the second is another website that I have. I'd appreciate any help on the matter.
Technical SEO | | Packetman0070 -
Schema for Services
There are many schemas for products, but I don't see any for services. They have intangible offers, but it's still for selling a product. I contacted Schema.org an no response. Here is the schema: http://schema.org/Offer So my question for someone who sells a service: What is the schema for a service like insurance, shipping, financial services?
Technical SEO | | Francisco_Meza0 -
Semantic Web and Schema
Is anyone from SEOmoz planning on writing anything about the Semantic Web and Schema and how they see it impacting SEO?
Technical SEO | | EricVallee340 -
How to fix 404 (Client Error) errors in wordpress blog?
hey A very quick question...after analyzed my wp blog I've found "34" 404 (Client Error) Errors and I don't know how to fix it, do you know how?? *I renew html code of 404 of my wordpress blog.
Technical SEO | | akitmane1 -
Google webmasters shows 37K not found errors
Hello we are using Joomla as our cms, months ago we used a component to create friendly urls, lots of them got indexed by google, testing the component we created three different types of URL, the problem now is that all of this tests are showing in google webmasters as 404 errors, 37,309 not found pages and this number is increasing everyday. What do you suggest to fix this?? Regards.
Technical SEO | | Zertuxte0