I have a project which will be using recommendations, not reviews. The only rich snippet that I can find that comes close is the Schema.org "review" but I don't have a "5 star" or anything like that to give it. These are plain text reviews.
Should I just fill in a 5 star since it's a recommendation and inform the poster that it will be displayed as such for ethical reasons or will I also run into problems with Google with having a site with nothing but 5 star reviews?
If your reviews don't have a rating, you shouldn't mark one up. According the the Schema.org FAQ there is no need to mark up every property:
Q: Do I have to mark up every property?
It is fine to mark up only some properties of an item - markup is not an all-or-nothing choice. However, marking up as much content as possible helps search engines use your information to present your page to users in the most useful way. As a general rule, you should mark up only the content that is visible to people who visit the web page and not content in hidden div's or other hidden page elements.
Giving everything a 5-star rating would be a misrepresentation of the content, and that would defeat the whole purpose of using structured data: to allow easier machine parsing of human content.
Related
category links for which i haven't created custom pages are displaying as red links. i was under the impression that actually creating a page is optional for category pages.
a typical situation can be :
an article is called up.
one of the category links at the bottom of the page will be red.
clicking on the link will take me to a valid category summary.
clicking on another category link at the bottom of the article (a white one) will
also take me to a valid category summary.
returning to the article, the second category link is now also red.
is there a way to tweak the wiki so category pages are displayed in white, regardless of whether they have a custom page created for them ?
the wiki is running MediaWiki 1.29.1.
as it turns out, the problem was that the styling for a.new and a.new:visited appeared with a higher precedence than that for catlinks. unless the desire is to require every single wiki to have every single category be fully defined [i.e., providing a landing page for each category], this isn't a good approach.
one of the great powerful features of mediawiki is its capability that allows admins and maintainers to categorise articles as they wish without requiring them to create a landing page for every single category. however, if this is your goal, the styling won't support it as-is, due to this precedence problem. you can insist on precedence for catlinks however, by appending !important. although many people detract from the use of !important, this use case is pretty much textbook for the reason it was designed in the first place.
if your need is more in line w/that envisioned by the maintainers of the current mediawiki release [i.e., you want to have a hand-designed landing page for every single category and have no need for truly automatically-generated categories], this is a non-issue.
The colors are set using CSS, you should create new CSS and add it to MediaWiki:Common.css to apply it to ask skins. If this page does not yet exist just create it.
The ‘.catlinks’ class controls the formatting of links to categories, and the colors for wanted pages are defined by the ‘.new’ class, eg a.new, a:new:visited.
The original code can be found in the mediawiki/resources/src/mediawiki.skinning/interface.css file.
Just add CSS to fix the font colors to those you choose to Common.css, eg
.catlinks,
.catlinks a.new,
.catlinks a.new:visited {
color: #0645ad;
}
we're just completing a new site build. With the current theme, we have had issues with structured data (we've highlighted it on Webmasters tools, and weeks later had to re-highlight it, and even then the highlighting prediction is not where we would like it to be).
It seems like Google is not able to find our Title, author, categories, content, featured image, date very easily. I'd expect to be able to communicate this to Google with 100% accuracy, since its so simple and we use the same format for all our articles). So maybe our theme is missing something by way of tags or something in the code to point to and identify this data?
Is that the case? Could someone please tell me what this aspect is called (so I can research it by its term), explain what I need to do with the new build, point me in the direction of an authoritative explanation/tutorial?
The site in question is a WordPress site, but I also am working on some php sites and would like to use this information on all sites, if it can be applied this way.
Thanks
You can use micro-data to mark-up the structured data. Also Google will really like your site if you show him (with a code) everything about the site - navigation, sidebar (aside), content (article) and so on. I suggest you to read about schema.org and micro-formats.
Here is an usefull article about your problem and how to implement micro-formats to your site.
I am creating a site for electronics and programming projects and articles, and I'm trying to figure out whether to use categories, tags or both. I've been leaning towards just using tags, as it's done here on StackOverflow.
Seen from the perspective of the user, what provides the best user experience and makes the information easy and intuitive to find. I realize that this is much a question of personal preference, but I am interested in hearing opinions.
Here is what I ended up doing: I implemented both categories and tags; a post can only have one category but multiple tags.
The category is used as part of the URL, this puts a keyword in the URL which is good for SEO and it makes the URLs more structured. The categories are selected from a drop-down menu, and they are required. Categories are type specific, meaning articles will probably not have the same categories as projects or images.
articles/foobar // Show all articles with the category foobar
articles/1/foobar/article_slug // View a specific article
Tags can be added and attached to a posts simply by typing them with comma separation, they are used in the meta keywords field. I don't think that matters much to SEO, but they are available so why not. Multiple tags can be attached to a post, but at least one is required. Tags are not type specific but universal, meaning that all resources may share the same tags. So a search for a tag may return articles, projects and images.
tags // Show all tags, and number of resources that use them
tags/foobar // Show all resources with the tag foobar
articles/tagged/foobar // Show all articles with the tag foobar
I'm going to be creating a Concrete5 website that will feature product listings. The listing system must offer all your typical ecommerce features, minus the ability to purchase items. It's strictly for browsing purposes only.
For example:
- Browse by category
- Search products
- Listings/results page with thumbnails and brief information (title, description, price in US/CAD, manufacturer, maker, etc.)
- Products single page (with detailed information, attributes and gallery/images)
All the things you'd expect to find in a listing system.
My issue is I can't find a specific add-on for something like product listings. This leaves me thinking that it may be best to use the e-commerce add on and do my best to hide anything related to the cart/payment process. That way it could just be used for everything else it offers.
What are your thoughts on this? Is there a better option?
Thanks for the advice!
Use the page list block. It has everything you need except for searching. But, in essence, that's what your requirements call for -- listing of pages.
Create a page type for your "product". The "brief information" can be in the Content block, or you can set as attributes. You'll probably want to make some minor changes to the block's view (by creating a new template) that displays the image as you want, the proper attributes, etc. Something similar to http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/designers/styling-the-page-list-block/
There are several adanced page list blocks in the marketplace. You might want to start with those.
Right creat Page type.
After creat Page attributes.
Add a block page_list create a template for it and filter by attributes.
You can even use ajax to filter.
http://www.weblicating.com/doku/doku.php?id=cheatsheet/#.UbR7P0BmiSp
U can find here about page_list or read documentation Concrete5.
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.