Google Rich Snippets – Structured Data Errors

[John Foley]

Hello, I was successful in setting up rel=author and publisher markup for my site but I am getting a lot of errors in rich snippets structured data tool for all my pages and posts.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

I've been trying to troubleshoot this issue for weeks without success. I'm afraid this is affecting overall SEO and page rank compared to my competitors. Originally I thought this was because my theme was not yet HTML5 enabled but I noticed that there are plenty of sites that have no errors while using XHTML when I check their url's. I could not find a workable solution anywhere. Some people mentioned having luck with the AuthorSure plugin but that did not work for me. I'd appreciate any help with this. Considering posting on Elance to have this resolved as I've spent way too much time on this. Feeling desperate at this point. Concerned about SEO impact. Here are the errors that show up in extracted data:

hatom-feed
hatom-entry:
Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.
Error: Missing required field "entry-title".
Error: Missing required field "updated".
Error: Missing required hCard "author".
Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.
Error: Missing required field "entry-title".
Error: Missing required field "updated".
Error: Missing required hCard "author".
Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.
Error: Missing required field "entry-title".
Error: Missing required field "updated".
Error: Missing required hCard "author".
Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.
Error: Missing required field "entry-title".
Error: Missing required field "updated".
Error: Missing required hCard "author".
Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.
Error: Missing required field "entry-title".
Error: Missing required field "updated".
Error: Missing required hCard "author".
Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.
Error: Missing required field "entry-title".
Error: Missing required field "updated".
Error: Missing required hCard "author".
Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.
Error: Missing required field "entry-title".
Error: Missing required field "updated".
Error: Missing required hCard "author".
Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.
Error: Missing required field "entry-title".
Error: Missing required field "updated".
Error: Missing required hCard "author".
Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.
Error: Missing required field "entry-title".
Error: Missing required field "updated".
Error: Missing required hCard "author".

Thanks for in advance for your time, assistance and consideration. Have a great weekend.

Regards,
John Foley
http://www.bodycures.com

http://www.bodycures.com

[Gary Jones]

Your post date customisation is gone awry, and has several components using the published class, when it should be a parent element that contains the whole date that also has the published class. If you can get the published microformat correct, then the updated value will fall back to that as per http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom#Entry_Updated .

The big collection of errors (which you've pasted in to this thread) are from the Featured Posts widget. Since this is sidebar content, and basically a list of titles, you're not missing out on anything. As it happens, I do think you've found a bug here for the entry-title errors, which I'll raise with the team.

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WordPress Engineer, and key contributor the Genesis Framework | @GaryJ

[John Foley]

Hello Gary, Thank you very much for your reply! This is very helpful. I am a novice but a quick learner. It makes sense that the big collection of errors was coming from the Featured Posts. I removed this widget which reduced the collection of errors down to only a few. May be due to another widget? I'll have to play with it. Thank you.

My research on this topic also led me to believe that somehow my published microformat was off. I assume this is built into the child theme I'm using. I'm running the latest Genesis. Interestingly, I just discovered that the AuthorSure plugin "FootNote setting" has a rich snippets function that handled the post date error. I don't like the idea of using plugins if I don't have to but I'm satisfied for the time being 🙂

Thanks again Gary! Have a great day.

Regards,
John Foley

[Gary Jones]

I can see that the folks at Spyr Media did your theme, so I'll tweet and hopefully get one of them to get in touch and see if they can sort ou that date issue so it gets rid of the remaining errors.

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WordPress Engineer, and key contributor the Genesis Framework | @GaryJ

[John Foley]

Thanks Gary. I learned that they are in the process of updating the (in)spyr theme to HTML5 and this should take care of the errors.

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