Penalty for Mixing Microdata with Metadata
-
The folks that built our website have insisted on including microdata and metadata on our pages.
What we end up with is something that looks like this in the header:
itemprop="description" content="Come buy your shoes from us, we've got great shoes.">
Seems to me that this would be a bad thing, however I can't find any info leaning one way or the other.
Can anyone provide insight on this?
-
Worth noting that meta desc isn't one of those 3 markup styles. it is a different thing completely so you aren't actually mixing schema in your example.
-
Thanks for sharing that link. That post is very informative.
-
Thanks for answering so quickly.
When I said "bad thing" I meant that I don't see how such redundancy could ever be beneficial.
Thank you for your thoughts.
-
I would read this post for more information: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/schema-examples
The post discusses how Google used to support 3 different styles of Markup but with the creation of Schema.org, decided to only use that going forward. Any websites with existing markup would be okay though.
Google also mentioned (noted in the article above) that you should avoid mixing different types of markup formats on the same page as it can confuse their parsers.
-
Why do you think this would be a bad thing? I'd question how much benefit will be gained in most areas by doing this, but I can't see it causing harm and it is good to get in there now with this rather than adding it later (assuming you've backed the right format!).
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
-
Google ranking penalty: Limited to specific pages or complete website?
Hi all, Let's say few pages on the website dropped in the rankings due to poor optimisation of the pages or hit by algo updates. Does Google limits the ranking drop only to these pages or the entire website will have any impact? I mean will this cause ranking drop to the homepage for primary keyword? Will Google pose the penalty to other pages in the website if few pages drop in the rankings. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do we have any risk or penalty for double canonicals?
Hi all, We have double canonicals. From page A to page B to Page C. Will this be Okay for Google? Or definitely we need to make it A to C and B to C? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Anyone experience google penalties for full-screen pop-ups?
Although we always recommend against onload pop-ups for clients, (we feel the effect the user experience) we do have a few clients that insist on them. I was reading this article the other day https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/17/how-do-i-make-sure-my-site-is-mobile-friendly/ which lead me to https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6101188 and I'm happy to see that Google is going to consider these types of content a downgrade when it comes to rank. My question is 2 fold: Has anyone experienced a drop in organic traffic on mobile due to this update? and do you think this will include user triggered content like photo galleries, bookings, email sign ups? We haven't noticed any drops yet but it is something we will be keeping a close eye on in the next little while. Let's hear what the community has to say 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | VERBInteractive1 -
Could we run into issues with duplicate content penalties if we were to borrow product descriptions?
Hello, I work for an online retailer that has the opportunity to add a lot of SKUs to our site in a relatively short amount of time by borrowing content from another site (with their permission). There are a lot of positives for us to do this, but one big question we have is what the borrowed content will do to our search rankings (we normally write our own original content in house for a couple thousand SKUs). Organic search traffic brings in a significant chunk of our business and we definitely don't want to do something that would jeopardize our rankings. Could we run into issues with duplicate content penalties if we were to use the borrowed product descriptions? Is there a rule of thumb for what proportion of the site should be original content vs. duplicate content without running into issues with our search rankings? Thank you for your help!
Algorithm Updates | | airnwater0 -
[G Penalty?] Significant Traffic Drop From All Sources
My client's traffic started to significantly decrease around Nov 21 (Panda update 22). This includes traffic from all sources - search engines (G, B, & Y!), direct, AND referral. At first we thought it was a G penalty but G answered our reconsideration request by stating that no manual penalty had occured. It could be algo penalty, but again, the site has been hit across all sources. Client has done zero backlinking - it is all natural. No Spam, etc.. All of his on-site SEO is perfect (700+ pages indexed, all unique content, unique title and desc). On Oct 16, he switched from his old URL to a new URL and did proper redirects. (Last year - Dec 2011 - he switched his CMS to Drupal and although there was a temporary decrease in traffic, it showed recovery within a month or so.) He does zero social on his site and he has many ads above the fold. Nevertheless, the traffic decrease is not source specific. In other words, all sources have decreased since Nov 21, 2012 and have not recovered. What is going on? What can be the explanation for decrease in traffic across all sources? This would be easy to answer if it was only Google Organic decrease but since direct and referral have also been hit, we cannot locate the problem. Please share your personal experiences as well as advice on where we should look. Could this be negative SEO? Where would we look? ANY ADVICE IS WELCOME !!!! Every bit counts Thanks!!
Algorithm Updates | | GreenPush0 -
Specific Page Penalty?
Having trouble to figure out why one of our pages is not ranking in SERPs, on-page optimisation looks decent to me. Checked by using gInfinity extension and searched for the page URL. Can one page be penalised from Google engines (.ie / .com ) and the rest of the website not penalised? The (possible) penalised page is showing in Google places in SERPs. I assume this would not show if it was penalised. Would appreciate any advice. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | notnem0 -
Redesign, new content, new domain and 301 redirects (penalty?)
We merged our old webshops into one big project. After a few days we received our rankings back and traffic was coming in. Then suddenly we lost almost all rankings overnight. We did not use any wrong seo techniques and have unique content, written by our own writers. Is this a penalty or do we have to wait longer?
Algorithm Updates | | snorkel0 -
Penalty or Algorithm hit?
After the Google Algorithm was updated my site took a week hit in traffic. The traffic came back a week later and was doing well a week AFTER the algorithm change and I decided that I should do a 301 redirect to make sure I didn't have duplicate content (www. vs. http://) I called my hosting company (I won't name names but it rhymes w/ Low Fatty) and they guided me through the supposedly simple process.. Well, they had me create a new (different) IP address and do a domain forward (sorry about bad terminology) to the www. This was in effect for approximately 2 weeks before I discovered it and came along with a subsequent massive hit in traffic. I then corrected the problem (I hope) by restoring the old IP address and setting up the HTACESS file to redirect all to www. It is a couple weeks later and my traffic is still in the dumps. On WMT instead of getting traffic from 10,000 keywords I'm getting it only from 2k. Is my site the victim of some penalty (I have heard of sandbox) or is my site simply just lower in traffic due to the new algorithm (I checked analytics data to find that traffic only in the US is cut by 50%, it is the same outside the US) Could someone please tell me what is going on?
Algorithm Updates | | askthetrainer0