Spammy structured data Issue (Markup Ok but considered spammy by Google) - schema.org

I received the message in Search Console about spammy structured data regarding one of my websites. Mind you - It's an older website that has not been up to the standards.
So I had all the error and warnings fixed and I submitted website for reconsideration. Reconsideration has been refused. Problem is I do not know why? Website pass the structured data testing tool test. There is no errors or warnings. At the moment markup is done within HTML ( not json-ld). Could someone take a look and advise me what I can do to have it fixed according to google guidelines and manual action removed.
I', not so sure if this is important or not, but index page is not the only one to contain markup for LocalBusiness. There are more pages similar to the index one, based on different location.
Website in question is http://www.man-van.biz
Thank you for your help in advance.

Problem has been solved. Problem was with duplicated schema markup on aggregate ratings (the same feedback's on all pages). Once I removed it from other pages and kept it only on index page and fix some other issues with markup reconsideration request has been approved and manual action removed.

Related

How to fix robots.txt

full disclaimer, I am not a programer, I am an SEO trying to learn how to not rely on my developer for every little question I have.
Currently my issue is this. I use Screaming Frog to crawl my sites to layout the page titles, meta descriptions, h1, h2, etc so I can more easily plan out my changes.
The other day I wanted to run a report for my client and my own company website and got the following back.
So I know robots.txt is a way to make pages on your site but not have google crawl them. What I don't know is why an entire site would have this message as opposed to just some pages.
Can anyone give advice on how to fix this or links to how to's? I get this issue a lot and would like to educate myself so I don't have to wait for someone else. I get these as well when I try indexing websites on Google Search Console.
Many Thanks
What I don't know is why an entire site would have this message as
apposed to just some pages.
The robots.txt for your website has not been written properly if the intention is to index its content.
Or Screaming Frog might have a but if indeed the robots.txt file is written properly.
Or some webmaster decided the content was not worth indexing on Google or that bots would eat too much bandwidth (as in not being selective to restrict access).
Checking the current robots.txt file on that website, I see this content:
User-Agent: *
Disallow:
Which means the any page of that website is allowed to be crawled by any crawler (here the explanation of that file's syntax: https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt)
So the current file should not cause that error OP mentions. Seeing that this question is from June 30/2017 and the robots.txt file was last modified on Jul 11/2017, it seems since this question was opened the OP may have already fixed whatever problem they had.

How do you keep track of your comments on GitHub issues?

I want to find all the GitHub issues that I commented on. I tried searching for commenter:mbigras type:issue like the Searching issues and pull requests GitHub article suggests. But that method returns fewer results than the public activity section of my profile.
See both attached images:
Search method
Doesn't display current results:
Profile method
Gets mixed up with other public activity:
Is there a way to get the full history of my comments on GitHub?
EDIT
author:mbigras type:issue gives wider results but still not the full history:
What I'm looking for is a way to quickly view all my comment/issue history in all issues.
EDIT
I emailed GitHub about this. Search doesn't match the public activity section because search indexes issues by creation date and not last active date.
How do you keep organized about which issues you've commented on?
Search for commenter:username in the main Github search box.
For example commenter:gavinandresen
To see recent activity, select Recently updated from Sort dropdown
You can also narrow the search: is:issue commenter:gavinandresen
I have also been very frustrated when I could not find an issue that I have commented on a while ago. I even did not remember the project it was in. I knew only the problem I was referring to.
Then, I went to the Notification settings on Github and saw there is an Include your own updates option that is unchecked by default.
Once you check it, Github will send you an e-mail notification about every comment or PR you make. They you probably want to add an appropriate label and filter for emails so Github messages do not clutter an inbox.
My life has changed since then. Now, every time I want to find something I have written on Github, I just search for it in the e-mail notifications.
You can view all the issues on Github you have commented on by going to https://github.com/notifications/subscriptions and selecting Reason as Comment.
This will show all the issues that you've commented on.
You can also filter the issues by selecting other reason such as Assign, Author, Manual, Mention, etc. but you can select only one reason at a time. Also, you can filter the issues by repository by selecting the concerned repository from dropdown after clicking Repository
Search All GitHub using the search term is:issue author:#me
You can also check the following links.
For all your subscriptions
https://github.com/notifications/subscriptions
For all your issues
https://github.com/issues
For all your pull requests
https://github.com/pulls
In case someone is interested to know how to find these links, go to github's resi api documentation. The URL's are not explicitly described there. However, look for the page names bellow REFERENCE.
If you lowercase the relevant word (for example Issues become issues, Pulls become pulls) and put that after https://github.com/, you most probably will find what you are looking for.
This might be a little late, but there's also another way to find what issues/PRs you have participated in. This method also brings in a lot more things you might be interested in too!
When you are on the website main page, on github.com, use the keyboard shortcuts as described here to open your pull requests or issues. The shortcut for these is in particular [g, i] for issues and [g, p] for pull requests (I remember g by go, but whatever works for you.)
After you go to the page directed by these shortcuts you are greeted by an entire screen of goodies you can use! The search bar can be edited and the buttons can be used to make your experience fast!
Type involves:<your username> in the search box on the GitHub's main page. This will find all the issues that you commented on, was assigned to or mentioned in.
For example, if your username on GitHub is unclebob, the search query should look like:
involves:unclebob
Or if you're logged in to GitHub, then simply:
involves:#me
Note the difference between involves and similar search qualifiers - author and commenter:
author will find only the issues that were started by you; if you comment on the issue that was started by someone else, author query won't return it in the search results.
E.g., compare involves:unclebob and author:unclebob type:issue.
commenter will find only those issues where you commented second or later (creator of the first comment in an issue is considered its author and not a commenter); if you start an issue and then never comment on it, the commenter query won't return it in the search results.
E.g., compare involves:unclebob and commenter:unclebob.
In other words, when it comes to searching comments, author and commenter return only a subset of involves' results. So I recommend using involves not to miss anything.
Also, since Github is on the web, any HTTP search engine works, eg Google, Bing, etc. This works to the extent of your search engine's quality and the uniqueness of the writer name.
(Indeed, I actually do this all the time when I need to find any previously written web (engine)-accessible publication, including those on StackExchange. Names I use are 1 in probably an infinity, so Google often works better than forum search options.)
(Sample Google link.)
If you want to search for multiple users in a single search, use it like in the global search bar without the OR logical conjugation:
commenter:FantomX1 commenter:FantomX1-github
since the similar google way approach with 'OR' would not work
commenter:FantomX1 OR commenter:FantomX1-github

Shopify: Variables Available on Thank You Page?

I've got a small bit of code on my Shopify thank you page for a home grown fulfillment system. In oversimplified terms, it outputs a URL with template code that uses the {{id}} field.
<p>
Your order information is {{id}}! This is not the actual code,
this is just an oversimplified version for this question
</p>
Up until a few weeks ago, the {{id}} template variable would output the ID of the order object. I use this ID and the Shopify REST api to fetch order information. Now, for reasons that remain unclear to me, this outputs a different number that appears to be the checkout-id field.
Is this intended behavior? Is there anyway to get the old, real order object ID back? I can think of numerous ways to work around this, but I'd rather not mess with a system that's worked in a stable way for the past 5 years.
Documentation on this is spotty at best, but it seems like the old global liquid variables I've been using have changed their behavior. Acording to Shopify's documentation, on that Thank You page
You have access to the checkout and shop liquid objects
There's documentation on both the checkout and shop objects, and I was able to get the old behavior I was after by replacing {{id}} with {{checkout.order_id}}.
It also appears there's a liquid order object available as well, but given it's not documented as being available on the checkout page, I'm not sure I'd trust it to keep working.

modx replacing article link with a link of categories

I've got a staging and live site I'm working on (not my code base). I've accidentally replaced the live server with some staging code (no backup (slap me)) and I'm getting weird urls for articles on the sites 'blog' page.
Basically everything's being called into the page correctly but the page header link is being screwed.
Rather than being
http://www.example.com/a-nice-url
it's giving me
http://www.example.com/news,recent,pr,etc
which appears to be the list of categories of the article.
Where/How can I easily fix this?
I'm only calling [[*content]] and can't find where that is.
Linking to an article I know is there with the correct url works still.
any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
I assume your blog page has some sort of listing somewhere, maybe a getResources call? If you can't find it in your blog list template (as you're saying you only see a *content), it means the list is probably "hardcoded" in the blog list resource content field.
You'll want to find the chunks being used to output each blog entry on the lists and check which page parameter is used to construct the link. It should probably be *alias, and if it is and your aliases are correct you have some deeper trouble going on.

Google Rich Snippets warnings for hCard

I get the following errors from the Google Rich Snippet Tool for my website http://iancrowther.co.uk/
hcard
Warning: This information will not appear as a rich snippet in search results results, because it seems to describe an organization. Google does not currently display organization information in rich snippets
Warning: At least one field must be set for Hcard.
Warning: Missing required field "name (fn)".
Im experimenting with vcard and Schema.org and am wondering if I'm missing something or the validator is playing up. I have added vcard and Schema.org markup to the body which may be causing confusion. Also, I am making the assumption I can use both methods to markup my code.
Update:
I guess with the body tag, I'm just trying to let Google discover the elements which make up the schema object within the page. I'm not sure if this is a good / bad way to approach things? However it lets my markup be free of specific blocks of markup. I guess this is open to discussion but I like the idea of having a natural flow to the content that's decorated in the background. Do you think there is any negative impact? I'm undecided.
I am in favour of the Person structure, this was a good call as this is more representative of the current site content. I am a freelance developer and as such use this page as my Organisation landing page, so I guess I have to make a stronger decision of the sites goals and tailor the content accordingly, ie Organisation or Person.
I understand that there is no immediate rich snippet gains, but im a web guy so have a keen interest in these kind of things.
With schema testing, I find it easiest to start from the most obvious problem, and try to work our way deeper from there. Note, I have zero experience with hcard, but I don't believe the error you mentioned actually has anything to do with your hcard properties.
The most obvious problem I see, is that your body tag has an itemtype of schema.org\Organization. When you set an itemtype on a dom element, you are saying that everything inside of that element is going to help describe that itemtype. Since you've placed this on your body element, you are quite literally telling Google that your entire page is about an organization.
From the content of your page, I would recommend changing that itemtype to schema.org\Person. This would seem to be a more accurate description. Once you make that change and run the scanner again, you may see more errors relating to the schema and we can work through those too (for example, you'll probably need to set familname and givenName).
With all of that said, you should know that currently there are no rich snippets that you will gain from adding this schema data. Properly setting this up on your page, is only good to do, especially since we don't know what rich snippets Google or others will expose in the future, but currently you won't see any additional rich snippets in Google search results from adding these tags. I don't want to discourage you from setting this up properly but I just want to set your expectations.