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;"> |
| | 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.
| |
| | 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.
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
-
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
Ridding of taxonomies, so that articles enhance related page's value
Hello, I'm developing a website for a law firm, which offers a variety of services. The site will also feature a blog, which would have similarly-named topics. As is customary, these topics were taxonomies. But I want the articles to enhance the value of the service pages themselves and because the taxonomy url /category/divorce has no relationship to the actual service page url /practice-areas/divorce, I'm worried that if anything, a redundantly-titled taxonomy url would dilute the value of the service page it's related to. Sure, I could show some of the related posts on the service page but if I wanted to view more, I'm suddenly bounced over to a taxonomy page which is stealing thunder away from the more important service page. So I did away with these taxonomies all together, and posts are associatable with pages directly with a custom db table. And now if I visit the blog page, instead of a list of category terms, it would technically be a list of the service pages and so if a visitor clicks on a topic they are directed to /practice-areas/divorce/resources (the subpages are created dynamically) and the posts are shown there. I'll have to use custom breadcrumbs to make it all work. Just wondering if you guys had any thoughts on this. Really appreciate any you might have and thanks for reading
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utopianwp0 -
Pages excluded from Google's index due to "different canonicalization than user"
Hi MOZ community, A few weeks ago we noticed a complete collapse in traffic on some of our pages (7 out of around 150 blog posts in question). We were able to confirm that those pages disappeared for good from Google's index at the end of January '18, they were still findable via all other major search engines. Using Google's Search Console (previously Webmastertools) we found the unindexed URLs in the list of pages being excluded because "Google chose different canonical than user". Content-wise, the page that Google falsely determines as canonical instead has little to no similarity to the pages it thereby excludes from the index. False canonicalization About our setup: We are a SPA, delivering our pages pre-rendered, each with an (empty) rel=canonical tag in the HTTP header that's then dynamically filled with a self-referential link to the pages own URL via Javascript. This seemed and seems to work fine for 99% of our pages but happens to fail for one of our top performing ones (which is why the hassle 😉 ). What we tried so far: going through every step of this handy guide: https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/panic-stations-how-to-handle-an-important-page-disappearing-from-google-case-study --> inconclusive (healthy pages, no penalties etc.) manually requesting re-indexation via Search Console --> immediately brought back some pages, others shortly re-appeared in the index then got kicked again for the aforementioned reasons checking other search engines --> pages are only gone from Google, can still be found via Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines Questions to you: How does the Googlebot operate with Javascript and does anybody know if their setup has changed in that respect around the end of January? Could you think of any other reason to cause the behavior described above? Eternally thankful for any help! ldWB9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SvenRi1 -
When do you use article markup for AMP pages?
Hi all! For a healthcare website we have setup AMP. Google Search Console suggests to use article markup for several pages and I am not sure if this is correct. There are two kind of pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeptAgency
1. News pages
2. Information pages, for example: symptoms alcohol addiction or Binge Eating Disorder There's no doubt the article markup will be correct for the news pages but I am not sure about the information pages. Do you guys suggest to implement article markup on these pages as well or only use this for real news/blog posts? Hope you can help me out. Thank you in advance and happy holidays! Regards, Anouk van de Velde0 -
Weird behavior with site's rankings
I have a problem with my site's rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mcurius
I rank for higher difficulty (but lower search volume) keywords , but my site gets pushed back for lower difficulty, higher volume keywords, which literally pisses me off. I thought very seriously to start new with a new domain name, cause what ever i do seems that is not working. I will admit that in past (2-3 years ago) i used some of those "seo packages" i had found, but those links which were like no more than 50, are all deleted now, and the domains are disavowed.
The only thing i can think of, is that some how my site got flagged as suspicious or something like that in google. Like 1 month ago, i wrote an article about a topic related with my niche, around a keyword that has difficulty 41%. The search term in 1st page has high authority domains, including a wikipedia page, and i currently rank in the 3rd place. In the other had, i would expect to rank easily for a keyword difficulty of 30-35% but is happening the exact opposite.The pages i try to rank, are not spammy, are checked with moz tools, and also with canirank spam filters. All is good and green. Plus the content of those pages i try to rank have a Content Relevancy Score which varies from 98% to 100%... Your opinion would be very helpful, thank you.0 -
Understanding Google's keyword tool...
When I type in Google a keyword like : boot camp I get results that show Bootcamp (one word) traffic in the tens of thousands. I see many words combined. Does this mean that tens of thousands of people every month are misspelling that keyword? How should I interpret this in terms of anchor texting? I would hate to deliberately misspell it on my website just to get traffic. For those interested, my website is: http://ultimatebasictraining.com/admin/ (currently revaming my http://ultimatebasictraining.com website)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0
