Spammy Structured Data?!
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Help! I woke up this morning to a message from Google that says: "Spammy structured data for http://www.riddelllaw.com/ might be dropped from search results." I am in over my head a bit and not sure what to do. I looked at Webmaster tools and it says something about the author in the testimonials on my page. The testimonials page is just a Wordpress Plugin - Testimonials Showcase.
Is the "spammy" result just indicated by errors in webmaster tools? Or could there be something else I am missing? Is this something I can fix on my own or should I hire someone who actually knows what they are doing? Thank you!!
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Thanks. That is the strange thing - I have had this plugin (and haven't added anything new) in at least year. I am not sure how to markup the author field, but will look into. I just tried to send you a private message, but I am not sure if it went through. Thank you again for the quick response!
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Hi Bridget,
Is there a plugin that you have installed recently for structured data?
Google did say a little while ago that spammy markup could be handed as a penalty, but it's a little difficult to know what is doing it.
Just took a quick look at your homepage in Google's structured data testing tool and this is what it shows (this error is repeated 3 times).
| author | A value for the author field is required. |
This might be something as simple as disabling the author option, but it's a bit hard to say without testing.
-Andy
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