Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
A few questions on Google's Structured Data Markup Helper...
-
I'm trying to go through my site and add microdata with the help of Google's Structured Data Markup Helper. I have a few questions that I have not been able to find an answer for. Here is the URL I am referring to: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-chicago
- My company is a bar/club, with only 4 out of 13 locations serving food. Would you mark this up as a local business or a restaurant?
- It asks for "URL" above the ratings. Is this supposed to be the URL that ratings are on like Yelp or something? Or is it the URL for the page? Either way, neither of those URLs are on the page so I can't select them. If it is for Yelp should I link to it?
- How do I add reviews? Do they have to be on the page?
- If I make a group of days for Day of the Week for Opening hours, such as Mon-Thu, will that work out?
- I have events on this page. However, when I tried to do the markup for just the event it told me to use itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" on the body tag of the page. That is just a small part of the page, I'm not sure why I would put the event tag on the whole body?
Any other tips would be much appreciated. Thanks!
-
Howl,
1. I would mark all up as a food establishment. Under menu/cuisine where you serve no food I would simply put an alcohol menu or link or on cuisine put we server beer, wine, tequila. etc. The reason is this: you are using schema because it is good for you and the search engines. Within the various schema are other properties. So for FoodEstablishment there is ... Bar or Pub. A bar or pub is a food establishment. So is an ice cream shop, winery, brewery, etc.
2. This is the page url. For me in Houston... http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-houston
3. I suggest you put in your own review schema and make the site where your customers can review you. Why would you want to serve yelp?? What do they do for you? Your site is using Joomla and with a quick check I found several review plugins you could utilize to make life simpler. We do not use Joomla as much but we often use a review plugin with our WP sites. And, it passes the markup test with Google.
4. Opening Hours - Here is the schema for opening hours. Pretty easy. If you look at the bottom of Local Business, you will see what will or will not work.
5. Here is the actual event schema from Schema.org
-
Upcoming shows
-
<div< span="">itemprop="event"itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/Event"></div<>
-
<a< span="">href="foo-fighters-may20-fedexforum"itemprop="url"></a<>
-
<span< span="">itemprop="name">FedExForum</span<>
-
<span< span="">itemprop="location">Memphis, TN, US</span<>
-
<meta< span="">itemprop="startDate"content="2011-05-20">May 20</meta<>
-
<a< span="">href="ticketmaster.com/foofighters/may20-2011"itemprop="offers">Buy tickets</a<>
-
<div< span="">itemprop="event"itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/Event"></div<>
-
<a< span="">href="foo-fighters-may23-midamericacenter"itemprop="url"></a<>
-
<span< span="">itemprop="name">Mid America Center</span<>
-
<span< span="">itemprop="location">Council Bluffs, IA, US</span<>
-
<meta< span="">itemprop="startDate"content="2011-05-23">May 23</meta<>
-
<a< span="">href="ticketmaster.com/foofighters/may23-2011"itemprop="offers">Buy tickets</a<>
So, you are going down the right path, I have never been to Howl in Houston but will check it out.
Best,
Robert
-
-
You can do either but the net effect is different. If you set things up for reviews on your page you will get these reviews indexed as content on your page and if marked up properly this will index on the major review sites(excluding Yelp I believe). You also have the advantage of control over what is or is not published. The down side to this is that you will need someone with skills to program this and do the mark up properly. You also need someone managing this prt of the web site.
The other way is to use an embedded link for the review sites. This will get the reviews done off of your site. These off site reviews can create inbound links. For Yelp this is pretty much the only way to do it.
I would factor in the review sites people use for Bars in Chicago, is it Redeye, Yelp, or Citysearch for example. I would set up my site that favors where people look for reviews when deciding whether or not to come to your business.
Hope this is clearer than mud.
Ron
-
Thanks for the response. So to clarify, to use the reviews I must have the actual reviews on the page. They cannot simply be linked to without putting them on the actual page?
-
Ok let's go through these questions on by one below:
My company is a bar/club, with only 4 out of 13 locations serving food. Would you mark this up as a local business or a restaurant?
I would mark the locations that have food as restaurants and the ones that do not as local business. I would set up and write a unique description for each location.
It asks for "URL" above the ratings. Is this supposed to be the URL that ratings are on like Yelp or something? Or is it the URL for the page? Either way, neither of those URLs are on the page so I can't select them. If it is for Yelp should I link to it?
You can either link to your off site reviews sites by getting an embed code or you can write some code with structured mark up to embed reviews into your web site that will be indexed by the search engines. There are references on line about how to do this.
How do I add reviews? Do they have to be on the page?
Look at answer above. As a sidenote you should make it a mission to get 10 reviews on Yelp, Google, and Bing for each location as this helps your local results.
If I make a group of days for Day of the Week for Opening hours, such as Mon-Thu, will that work out?
Yes
I have events on this page. However, when I tried to do the markup for just the event it told me to use itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" on the body tag of the page. That is just a small part of the page, I'm not sure why I would put the event tag on the whole body?
Can't help you on this one.
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
-
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Why do people put xml sitemaps in subfolders? Why not just the root? What's the best solution?
Just read this: "The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/." here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#location Yet surely it's better to put the sitemaps at the root so you have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
(a) http://example.com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-spongecakes.xml
and so on... OR this kind of approach -
(b) http://example/com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap/chocolatecakes.xml and
http://example.com/sitemap/spongecakes.xml I would tend towards (a) rather than (b) - which is the best option? Also, can I keep the structure the same for sitemaps that are subcategories of other sitemaps - for example - for a subcategory of http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml I might create http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes-cherryicing.xml - or should I add a sub folder to turn it into http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes/cherryicing.xml Look forward to reading your comments - Luke0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Chinese Sites Linking With Bizarre Keywords Creating 404's
Just ran a link profile, and have noticed for the first time many spammy Chinese sites linking to my site with spammy keywords such as "Buy Nike" or "Get Viagra". Making matters worse, they're linking to pages that are creating 404's. Can anybody explain what's going on, and what I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" /> With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4 -
Should I use both Google and Bing's Webmaster Tools at the same time?
Hi All, Up till now I've been registered only to Google WMT. Do you recommend using at the same time Bing's WMT? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0