Everything You Need to Know About Spammy Structured Markup Penalty

Used correctly, structured markup data is a good decision to help websites display correct information on searches and increase organic search visibility. But what happens if you use it incorrectly?

As we all know, Google is not a fan of websites that don’t comply with quality guidelines and don’t offer the best user experience. So it may be that the structured data abuse to mark irrelevant content can potentially hurt your site. If you’ve been hit by a spammy structured markup penalty, you know what I’m talking about. If not, you’ll understand what you need to do in the following lines.

All your questions will be answered today. You’ll find out how a spammy structured data looks like, how to remove and avoid a penalty and if there are any repercussions.

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It all started with a question on Google Webmaster Central office hours hangout. Plus, we’ve seen a lot of discussions many times before from people around the internet saying their structured data is removed from search engine results. You can find questions on Twitter, Reddit or social media in general, forums (including **Google Webmaster Forum**), blog post comments and so on.

We decided to take the matter into our own hands and find out if there is such a thing as spammy structured markup penalty, how to avoid it, and if it has any impact on rankings.

1. How Does Structured Data Work

Structured markup data is used by a website to make Google understand better the content on a page. Furthermore, it can improve the appearance of a page on search. The main purpose of the structured markup data is to offer an organized search experience to the user. Google Search also uses structured data to show rich result displays, as you can see in the following screenshot.

Nonetheless, on Google Developers, there is an explanatory note, saying that:

Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results, even if your page is marked up correctly according to the Structured Data Testing Tool.

There is the situation where your rich snippets might not appear even if they are set up correctly. That happens because Google knows the users might not be interested in that information.

Nonetheless, every now and then there is someone who wants to exaggerate and take a lot of space in SERP with redundant information. And that’s why we probably have so many Google guidelines.

Basically, if you want to display rich snippets in Google, you need to observe the Structured Data Guidelines and your site needs to comply with the Webmaster Guidelines.

Spammy Structured Data Examples

Reviews are a widespread practice, maybe one of the most used rich snippets. If you search on Google for “best vacuum reviews” at some point, you will find this site:

At first sight, it doesn’t send a spammy signal, but if you take a second look at the reviews and the title tag, you’ll find out that there might be more products on the page. After you enter the site, you’ll find a list of vacuums. Each of them has a different set of 5-star ratings.

That’s not making any sense. How are those five stars from the SERP calculated? At the bottom of the page there is some sort of an explanation box:

But in the end, what do the 5-star ratings in SERP exactly mean? Because the explanation box shows only 3/5 stars, not 5/5 as featured on Google. It abuses the rich snippets reviews, it is misleading and violates the Structured Data Guidelines.

The page mentioned above has a lot of bad snippets integration:

The first one is the fact that the site wrote those reviews (as you could see in the title – “We rated this vacuum”). Google explains very well that the reviews must come from customers or unpaid users and under no circumstances by the site.

Snippets must not be written or provided by the business or content provider unless they are genuine, independent, and unpaid editorial reviews.

Another one is the fact that the reviews need to be assigned for a single product/service, not for all of them. For example, “hotels in Madrid,” “summer dresses,” or “cake recipes” are not specific items. And of course “pet hair vacuums” is not very specific.

Provide review and/or rating information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of items.

Structured Data Testing Tool is the easiest way to view a result from your data and check if you have set them right.

Groupon has some bad usage of markup data for a page with Amazon coupons. For example, if we use the testing tool, we can see that a link was marked instead of the name of the offer.

The guidelines assert very clearly that the name of the product has to be text, the name of the product itself, not the name of the company, the manufacturing, or the description of the URL.

Correct Structured Data Examples

After all these bad examples, we deserve to see a good implementation of structured data markup as well.

Booking.com has good implementations for the accommodations. In the screenshot below, you can see that we’ve searched for a specific hotel, and it has 4 stars out of 5, the number of reviews, and the price.

If we look on TripAdvisor, we will see the same number of stars and reviews. For the price, TripAdvisor gives an average value based on the aggregator websites mentioned as partners.

2. Does Spammy Structured Markup Penalty Really Exist?

According to Google, spammy structured markup penalty exists. On Webmasters Forum there are many people that received a message in Search Console; Manual actions saying that the website’s schema code is spammy and violates Google’s quality guidelines.

In the screenshot below you can see an example of such a message:

In June 2017, John Mueller talked about spammy structured markup penalty. See below the message he received in the hangout:

Recently, we’ve been hit with a penalty for spammy structured data and we’d like some advice so we can adhere to the guidelines going forward. The guidelines are a little fuzzy in this area, as most of our pages are service categories.

We searched for the user on Google Webmaster Forum after we identified his question in the hangout comments area on Google +. We saw his question on the forum and found what experts were suggesting.

An expert on the forum even gives him an example of good integration:

Create reviews snippets for a specific service provided by the business (mechanic in this case). You could mark up Service type and then you could nest LocalBusiness (AutoRepair) via the provider property.

We’d recommend creating a dedicated page for each service and then mark up the reviews. It is very important to use product schema markup format with caution.

When using review markup, the main topic of the page needs to be about a specific product or service. You should absolutely not use review markup on a list of products/services, articles, a list of items, etc.

It might create a misleading or deceptive search experience to the user if the markup is not visible on the page. Here’s what Google says:

In case Google sees structured data doesn’t comply with the standard, then it reserves the right to take manual actions. As a result, Google has applied actions to the affected portions of your site, which may affect how your site is displayed in search results.

3. What to Do If You’re Hit by a Structured Data Penalty

An ideal solution would be to have no manual webspam actions found on your site.

Yet, if you do have spammy markup data, you’ll most likely receive a manual penalty. In this case, there are some things you should know.

Firstly, look for a ray of light, keep your fingers crossed, knock on wood, and carry real rabbits’ feet on your keychains.

Leaving the joke aside, the first thing you need to do is set up the markup on your site according to Google’s structured data guidelines.

After you check your markup to see if there are any errors or warnings, you need to fix them. Mostly the errors are about incorrect schema markup.

The process is relatively simple; it requires changing your markup data on the appropriate page, updating, or deleting it if it’s not applicable. The final step is to submit a reconsideration request.

After that, you should wait for Google’s answer. If you follow their recommendations, Google’s penalty should be removed.

4. How to Avoid a Spammy Structured Markup Penalty

I know I’ve said it before, but the easiest way to avoid a structured markup penalty would be to observe Google’s guidelines and stay off the spammy radar. But as we all know, this doesn’t happen all the time.

Another suggestion would be to test, test, and once again test. Google Structured Data Testing Tool is the one and only help to determine the accuracy of your schema used on your site. Lastly, if you have a hint of possible unnatural Schema markup, send a message to Webmaster Central Help Forum and seek guidance.

Some of the things you could do to avoid a spammy structured markup penalty are:

• Have relevant, engaging answers/results for user’s search queries;
• Use structured data for visible content only;
• Check and fix any warnings with Google’s testing tool;
• Use different markup for the pages within your website;
• Integrate markup data for events only, not non-events (for example, Last minute trip to Niagara Falls);
• Have reviews written by genuine customers or unpaid reviewers and not by the site or business.

5. Will Structured Markup Action Kill My Rankings?

Another hot topic regarding the spammy rich snippets is “ranking drops.” Is it for real? Does spammy structured markup kill Google rankings?

In the same hangout, I mentioned before, John Mueller said that, in most cases, the site’s ranking might not get affected by the loss of structured markup data.

His exact answer was:

However, the tricky part is that losing the rich snippet might lead to losing traffic as well.

A business owner said in the hangout that his site experienced a 10% dip in search traffic because he lost the rich snippets.

Another example of a ranking loss after the manual action for spammy markup was discovered by two digital marketers, Daniel Rapoport Porat & Doron Wolffberg, and posted on YellowHead.

Conclusion

Following our guidelines will help you avoid Google’s dance and have relevant answers in SERP for users’ search queries. If by mistake or by any chance you wanted to fool Google without being caught, expect no less than having rich snippets removed from SERP. If implemented correctly, Google’s rich snippets can improve the user experience on-site, giving additional information, it can lower the bounce rate and sometimes improve conversion rates.

The road to correctly used markup data is easy, but you have to do your work first. Read Google’s documentation, seek guidance on the forum if you have troubles implementing the schema.org. Follow Google’s guidelines and mark up the content correctly. Then wait for Google to read it and decide whether it will go live or not.