Word-Press Recipe Plug-ins Lead to Increased Google Spammy Structured Markup Manual Actions
February 10, 2016
Kanika Kanojia
Since last month, there has been a rise in the number of manual actions related to “Spammy Structured Mark-up” aka rich snippet manual actions. And no! Intentional spamming might not be the main reason behind it. Rather, structured mark-up data which gets automatically added to your website by WordPress plug-ins might have caused this.
Out of more than a dozen threads, some of the commonly reported ones are:
- Manual action message type
- Review snippets suddenly gone?
- Partial Match- Manual Action
- Spammy Structured Markup – We don’t find the problem
Image Courtesy : https://www.seroundtable.com
Experts have narrowed these down to the following Word Press plug-ins which might have been causing the issue:
- Ziplist
- WP-Ultimate Recipe
- Yummly
- Easy Recipe Plus
There could be additions to this list.
So, what’s the solution at hand? Well! Refrain from using structured markup on every page on your website as many of these plugins just add them to everything.
A message indicating structured mark-up manual penalty may read like this:
Google has detected structured markup on some of your pages that we believe violates our structured data guidelines. Because incorrect information lowers the quality of search results for users, rich snippets will not appear in Google Search results for pages with incorrect structured data markup. This manual spam action has been applied to pinoyrecipe.net/. We suggest you update the incorrect structured data and file a reconsideration request once you have fixed your site. After we determine that you have complied with our guidelines, we will remove this manual action.