{"id":52073,"date":"2019-10-21T13:35:22","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T11:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.humanlevel.com\/sin-categorizar\/malos-usos-de-datos-estructurados.html"},"modified":"2023-10-11T08:16:25","modified_gmt":"2023-10-11T06:16:25","slug":"misuse-of-structured-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.humanlevel.com\/en\/blog\/seo\/misuse-of-structured-data","title":{"rendered":"Mistakes to avoid when applying structured data markup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Structured data<\/strong> allows specify to the Google robot the type of information contained in a website<\/strong> so that it can to interpret it better<\/strong> and, with certain types of data, enrich how search results<\/a> are displayed<\/strong> and generate printouts in voice assistants. <\/strong>However, if the incorrectly applied, the page could be penalized in a manual Google review.<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In the documentation on the manual actions that Google performs to penalize a site<\/a>, we find multiple examples of misuse or abuse of structured data. These failures are always done intentionally as a Black Hat SEO strategy, <\/strong>in order to appear in the SERPS<\/a> with rich snippets<\/strong>. It is very rare to make one of these mistakes unintentionally, so even if we claim that we have done it unintentionally, we will still be penalized in a manual review.<\/p>\n

We should not be afraid of being penalized for structured data<\/strong>as we have already mentioned on other occasions, well used, they improve positioning and visibility in searches<\/a>, in addition to appearances in voice searches<\/a>.<\/strong> To take advantage of structured data without being penalized, we must always apply them correctly and without deceit.<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Next, let’s see what types of errors we should avoid<\/strong>, both if we want Google<\/strong> to interpret the data correctly<\/strong> and if we don’t want to be penalized<\/strong>. Basically, we have these types of errors:<\/p>\n

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  1. Syntactic errors.<\/strong> They can be of two types:\n
      \n
    1. Commitments on language formatting.<\/li>\n
    2. Assignments on the grammar specified by schema.org and Google vocabularies.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
    3. Semantic errors.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      These are the same mistakes that can be made with any markup language<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

      Syntactic errors<\/h2>\n

      Syntactic errors occur when a language is written and the rules of language grammar are not followed<\/strong>. In the case of structured data we have to follow two types of grammatical rules<\/strong>: those of the format in which we are going to write it, for example JSON-LD, and the grammatical rules of the language defined by the schema.org vocabulary.<\/p>\n

      Syntactic errors on formatting<\/h3>\n

      As we have already mentioned, these are errors made when writing the format of structured data<\/strong>, whether JSON-LD or microdata<\/strong>, so that the data type cannot be interpreted<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

      Let’s see an example where we generate a JSON-LD with several<\/strong> typical syntax errors<\/strong>. One of them is caused by not taking into account that the “license” attribute may be empty when generating this code:<\/p>\n

      {\r\n   \"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\/\",\r\n   \"@type\":\"BlogPosting\",\r\n   license: \r\n   headline:\"ejemplo\",\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n
      If we do not have a value for “license”, we should remove this attribute or add an empty string, as follows, to avoid the syntax error and make it a correct JSON:<\/p>\n
      {\r\n   \"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\/\",\r\n   \"@type\":\"BlogPosting\",\r\n   \"license\": \"\",\r\n   \"headline\":\"ejemplo\"\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n
      The other syntax errors corrected in the example, in case you have not seen them, are the quotation marks in the attributes and the elimination of the last comma before the closing braces. Required attributes are also missing, but these are not errors due to not following the syntax of the format, but due to not following the syntax of the vocabulary.<\/p>\n
      To avoid making mistakes in the formation of structured data, we must follow the JSON grammar, defined in RFC 7159<\/a>, the JSON-LD<\/a> specification in the W3C<\/a> and the specification<\/strong> of  microdata in the WhatWG<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n
      When a markup language follows the grammatical rules of its format correctly, it is said to be well-formed <\/strong>(in XML validation<\/a>tools, such as a sitemap, it is common to find this expression).<\/p>\n
      Syntactic errors about schema.org and Google<\/h3>\n
      They are those committed by not following the grammatical rules of the schema.org or Google specification<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
      Examples of syntactic errors of this type are:<\/p>\n