Schema Markup Errors - Priority or Not?

[AfroSEO]

Greetings All...

I've been digging through the search console on a few of my sites and I've been noticing quite a few structured data errors. Most of the errors are related to: hcard, hentry and hatom. Most of them are missing author & entry-title, while the other one is  missing: fn.

I recently saw an article on SEL about Google's focus on spammy mark-up. The sites I use are built and managed by vendors, so I would have to impress upon them the impact of these errors and have them prioritize, then fix them.

My question is whether or not this should be prioritized? Should I have them correct these errors sooner than later or can I take a phased approach? I haven't noticed any loss in traffic or anything like that, I'm more focused on what negative impact a "phased approach" could have.

Any thoughts?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Yes, I would consider this a priority as you want to have the most upto date and relevant markup on your site, so that crawlers can better understand your important information and attribute the right properties to your site/content.

I would also focus on Schema, as it's recognized by major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex, so you are pleasing multiple crawlers at once. Pages that have this markup also tend to rank four positions higher than pages without. So it is definitely worth the investment of time.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Everett]

I think it depends on what else you have in the queue for your clients. Without knowing what other priorities you have, I can't say whether this is more or less important. However, as Patrick said, correct markup helps search engines understand more about the context of what's on the page. It probably won't make a big ranking impact, and I doubt you're going to get penalized for some markup errors as long as you're not trying to spam using markup.

I definitely prefer Schema.org markup over Hcard, but rather than implementing it as per Schema.org you may want to consider JSON-LD - https://developers.google.com/schemas/formats/json-ld .

[AfroSEO]

Thanks for the responses.

These changes will be managed by the developers, so it won't impact any other priorities that I have in the queue. My concern was whether this was pressing enough that I would have to push the developer towards a hard timeline vs a more phased one. I took a look at other clients on this platform and saw the same errors. So, this may be a platform wide markup error.

These are automotive clients, so their sites are OEM mandated. Therefore, I don't have any say in the types of markup they use. But, my goal is to impress upon them the fact that these errors could definitely negatively impact my clients (if not now, in the future).

[Everett]

In that case I would say a phased approach would be fine. It is an issue that should be addressed, but I wouldn't classify it as "critical".