For Google's Structured Data, should I change my listings from Product schema to Local Business schema?

[stuartstein]

I was reading Google's Structured Data spec, and I'm considering changing the schema of our listing pages from the Product schema to the Local Business schema. Is this a good idea?

To give you a little more info, the pages that I'm classifying are listings for physical spaces that our website rents out for activities, such as meetings. Here's an example of a listing: https://www.peerspace.com/pages/listings/550ddcde2f352d0800fc186b 

Our goal is to add the proper schema.org tags to the page so that our spaces show up in local searches, such as "meeting space in San Francisco."

The problem is that when we add location microdata (addressLocality, addressRegion, etc.) to our current "Product" schema, Google tells us that "Products" can't have a location. However, we aren't quite a "Local Business" either, since we don't publicly share our space's street addresses—only the space's neighborhood/city/state for privacy reasons. As a result, we get an error from Google's Structured Data Tool as a "Local Business" page because "streetAddress" is required for Local Businesses.

Should we switch to the Local Business schema anyway, even though we get structured data errors for streetAddress? Or is it better not to include the location information in the microdata so that we don't have errors? Does Google penalize you for incomplete tags?

Any input is appreciated!

[stuartstein]

Thanks- this sounds right. We decided to keep our pages as Product pages.

[VERBInteractive]

Google is penalizing for spammy schema markup, (see: http://searchengineland.com/spammy-structured-markup-penalty-recovery-use-schema-markup-caution-223289) So if it's an error because of incomplete information, I would keep it as a product.