Thursday 6 February 2014

Google’s Latest Manual Action Penalty: Spammy Structured Markup

No comments

google-web-spam

Google has recently began sending a new manual action spam notification to webmasters for “spammy structured markup” also known as rich snippet spam.
This comes after Google dropped 15% of the rich snippets, setting the bar higher for what sites are able to display rich snippets in the search results.
The new manual action message from Google reads as follows:
Spammy structured markup
Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google’s Rich Snippet Quality guidelines.
This is the first time we’ve seen this manual action, in fact, it is not listed in the manual actionshelp page on Google’s guidelines page.
A webmaster reported getting this in the Google forums.