Google stopped showing rich snippets - what does warning mean?
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Hi,
for our site prams.net, Google stopped showing the rich snippets yesterday. We got the following warning in Webmastertools
"Data with spam structures http://www.prams.net/ may be removed from the search results"
As we have not changed anything for months, I do not know what the reason could be. Here a sample url from our site
http://www.prams.net/brevi-ovo-twin
Does anybody have experience with this and can give me a tip what to change?
Thanks in advance.
Dieter Lang
Here the full message.
Google has found some of your pages markup with structures that violate our quality guidelines for structured data. To provide users with high quality search results, we show detailed search results only for content with markup that meet our quality guidelines. This manual action was against prams.net/ imposed. You should correct the markup and make a request for reconsideration. Having noted that the guidelines for the markup on the pages in question are complied with, we will remove this manual action.
You can resolve this problem as follows:
| 1 |
Update your markup so that it no longer violates our guidelines for structured data
Correct Incorrect markup or remove the markup that is not the content of your page properly.
| See guidelines |
| 2 |Ask a reconsideration request
Once you have corrected your website, you can submit a reconsideration request, so this manual action is canceled. Be specific so that we can understand what changes you have made to your site.
Need more help?
| • | For more information on manual actions against data with spam structures can be found in our Help Center. |
| • | Refer to the section Guidelines for structured data about the problem. |
| • | Ask in our forum questions if you need more help. Make reference to the message type [WNC-632 900]. | -
Thanks for your help. We reduced our markup considerably down to the review markup as you suggested.
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Looking into the code it seems like there's an excessive amount of markup. Each schema type has various rules about what it should apply to, so it's not hard to violate one of the rules if you're not consciously applying each rule. Just a quick look and I see 13 of these:
itemscope="itemscope"
Not sure what that's supposed to be doing, but I don't think it's correct syntax. Unfortunately looking deeply into a page with so much markup (101 itemprops!) to fix every possible violation is WAY beyond the scope of a question that I can answer here. Generally I'd suggest only using markup where you really want the snippet to appear rather than tagging everything. There's just too much to go wrong.
Beyond that, use Google's structured data testing tool and the structured data section in Webmaster Tools to make sure what you have is working. There are probably some Magento plugins that could handle this for you. Really I think all you need to tag are the product and review-centered markup.
Sorry that didn't help as much as you'd like, but there are dozens of potential minor technical problems to fix. There's enough markup that I can see why Google thinks its spam. In this case, less is probably more. I'd consolidate way down to review markup, make sure it's accurate, and only expand markup carefully once that's working.
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Fix your "lowPrice" and "highPrice" markup (remove € and add
priceCurrency)
to be honest, I think it was automatically flagged (same ratings/reviews on multiple urls) and if you can request reconsideration, they'd approve.
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