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;"> |
| | ![](<a class=)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.
| |
| | ![](<a class=)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.
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
-
A client rebranded a few years ago and doesn't want to be associated with it's old brand name. He wishes not to appear when the old brand is searched in Google, is there something we can do?
The problem is there was redirection between the old branded site and the new one, and now when you type in the name of the old brand, the new one comes up. I have desperately tried to convince this client there is nothing we can do about it, dozens of news articles crop up with the two brands together as this was a hot topic a few years ago, but just in case I missed something I thought I'd ask the community of experts here on Moz. An example for this would be Tyco Healthcare that became covidien in 2007. When you type tyco healthcare, covidien crops up here and there. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netsociety0 -
Any idea why Google Search Console stopped showing "Internal Links" and "Links to your site"
Our default eCommerce property (https://www.pure-elegance.com) used to show several dozen External Links and several thousand Internal Links on Google Search Console. As of this Friday both those links are showing "No Data Available". I checked other related properties (https://pure-elegance.com, http:pure-elegance.com and http://www.pure-elegance.com) and all of them are showing the same. Our other statistics (like Search Analytics etc.) remain unchanged. Any idea what might have caused this and how to resolve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SudipG0 -
Why is /home used in this company's home URL?
Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How should I handle URL's created by an internal search engine?
Hi, I'm aware that internal search result URL's (www.example.co.uk/catalogsearch/result/?q=searchterm) should ideally be blocked using the robots.txt file. Unfortunately the damage has already been done and a large number of internal search result URL's have already been created and indexed by Google. I have double checked and these pages only account for approximately 1.5% of traffic per month. Is there a way I can remove the internal search URL's that have already been indexed and then stop this from happening in the future, I presume the last part would be to disallow /catalogsearch/ in the robots.txt file. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrappleAgency0 -
How to remove my site's pages in search results?
I have tested hundreds of pages to see if Google will properly crawl, index and cached them. Now, I want these pages to be removed in Google search except for homepage. What should be the rule in robots.txt? I use this rule, but I am not sure if Google will remove the hundreds of pages (for my testing). User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow2013
Disallow: /
Allow: /$0 -
"No Index" Extensions
Hi there, We run an e-commerce website and we are aware of our duplicate page content/title problems. We know about the "rel canonical" tag and the "no index" tag but I am more interested in the latter. We use a CMS called Magento. Now, Magento has an extension that allows you to use the "no follow" and "no index" tag on products. Google has indexed many of our pages and I wanted to know if applying the "no index" tag on duplicate pages will instruct Google to remove the duplicate url's it has already indexed. I know the tag will tell Google not to index a page but what if I apply it to a product already indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iBags0 -
Rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" both necessary?
We are fighting some duplicate content issues across multiple domains. We have a few magento stores that have different country codes. For example: domain.com and domain.ca, domain.com is the "main" domain. We have set up different rel="alternative codes like: The question is, do we need to add custom rel="canonical" tags to domain.ca that points to domain.com? For example for domain.ca/product.html to point to: Also how far does rel="canonical" follow? For example if we have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlliedComputer
domain.ca/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/sub/product.html
then,
domain.com/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/product.html0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0