Received A Notice Regarding Spammy Structured Data. But we don't have any structured data or do we?

[KentH]

Got a message that we have spammy structured data on our site via webmaster tools and have no idea what they are referring to. We do not use any structured data using schema.org mark up. Could they be referring to something else?

The message was:

To: Webmaster of <a>http://www.lulus.com/</a>,

Google has detected structured markup on some of your pages that violates our structured data quality guidelines. In order to ensure quality search results for users, we display rich search results only for content that uses markup that conforms to our quality guidelines. This manual action has been applied to lulus.com/ . We suggest that you fix your markup and file a reconsideration request. Once we determine that the markup on the pages is compliant with our guidelines, we will remove this manual action.

What could we be showing them that would be interpreted as structured data, and or spammy structured data?

[anders_search]

Hello,

I think whatever opengraph plugin you are using on your pages might be causing the issue. Take a look at: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lulus.com%2Fcategories%2F13%2Fdresses.html

On a semi-related note, your og:image tag is missing 'og:image:width' and 'og:image:height'.

[KentH]

Thank you for your insight the data testing tool is very helpful.

https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/

• Kent

[ThompsonPaul]

It's highly unlikely you'd get a manual penalty for incorrect Open Graph markup (especially since Google itslef doesn't use it for anything.)

Instead of trying to test one-off pages with the data testing tool, have a look in your Google Search Console under the Search Appearance > Structured Data report. Here you'll see what Google's crawler thinks about the structured markup on all the pages of your site it is able to crawl. Much better chance that the crawler has caught and reported it than that you'll find it checking one page at a time.

One of the really common types of markup that earned manual penalties recently was recipes (due to certain plugins not implementing it correctly.) Since your site doesn't include recipes, the other area to check closely is reviews/ratings. If Google thinks you're trying to use these manipulatively, they'll slap you hard, since these actually generate rich snippets in SERPS.

In the brief look I had at your site, it didn't appear your reviews/rating were using markup, but that's where an exhaustive check using the GSC report would be vastly more effective than my cursory check.

Hope that all makes sense? Good luck!

Paul