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 does educational organization schema interact with Google's knowledge graph?
Hi there! I was just wondering if the granular options of the Organization schema, like Educational Organization (http://schema.org/EducationalOrganization) and CollegeOrUniversity (http://schema.org/CollegeOrUniversity) schema work the same when it comes to pulling data into the knowledge graph. I've typically always used the Organization schema for customers but was wondering if there are any drawbacks for going deep into the hierarchy of schema. Cheers 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Corbec8880 -
Site structure: Any issues with 404'd parent folders?
Is there any issue with a 404'd parent folder in a URL? There's no links to the parent folder and a parent folder page never existed. For example say I have the following pages w/ content: /famous-dogs/lassie/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud
/famous-dogs/snoopy/
/famous-dogs/scooby-doo/ But I never (and maybe never plan to) created a general **/famous-dogs/ **page. Sitemaps.xml does not link to it, nor does any page on my site. Is there any concerns with doing this? Am I missing out on any sort of value that might pass to a parent folder?0 -
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 -
After reading of Google's so called "over-optimization" penalty, is there a penalty for changing title tags too frequently?
In other words, does title tag change frequency hurt SEO ? After changing my title tags, I have noticed a steep decline in impressions, but an increase in CTR and rankings. I'd like to once again change the title tags to try and regain impressions. Is there any penalty for changing title tags too often? From SEO forums online, there seems to be a bit of confusion on this subject...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felix_LLC0 -
Google News URL Structure
Hi there folks I am looking for some guidance on Google News URLs. We are restructuring the site. A main traffic driver will be the traffic we get from Google News. Most large publishers use: www.site.com/news/12345/this-is-the-title/ Others use www.example.com/news/celebrity/12345/this-is-the-title/ etc. www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ www.example.com/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ (Celebrity is a channel on Google News so should we try and follow that format?) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title/12345/ www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title-12345/ (unique ID no at the end and part of the title URL) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ Others include the date. So as you can see there are so many combinations and there doesnt seem to be any unity across news sites for this format. Have you any advice on how to structure these URLs? Particularly if we want to been seen as an authority on the following topics: fashion, hair, beauty, and celebrity news - in particular "celebrity name" So should the celebrity news section be www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ or what? This is for a completely new site build. Thanks Barry
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deepti_C0 -
Include Cross Domain Canonical URL's in Sitemap - Yes or No?
I have several sites that have cross domain canonical tags setup on similar pages. I am unsure if these pages that are canonicalized to a different domain should be included in the sitemap. My first thought is no, because I should only include pages in the sitemap that I want indexed. On the other hand, if I include ALL pages on my site in the sitemap, once Google gets to a page that has a cross domain canonical tag, I'm assuming it will just note that and determine if the canonicalized page is the better version. I have yet to see any errors in GWT about this. I have seen errors where I included a 301 redirect in my sitemap file. I suspect its ok, but to me, it seems that Google would rather not find these URL's in a sitemap, have to crawl them time and time again to determine if they are the best page, even though I'm indicating that this page has a similar page that I'd rather have indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WEB-IRS0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0