Alpha1
Well-known member
- Affected version
- 1.5.22
Google is marking hundreds of thousands of threads as 'Spammy structured markup' and a violation of their policies because of the way data-vocabulary microdata is used for 'Person'. This has a negative effect on ranking. At least for sites that are classed by Google as YMYL (critical for well-being).
As you know for most microdata (not all) XenForo opted for Data-Vocabulary microdata markup which was abandoned in 2011 instead of Schema.org which is now the standard. See: http://www.data-vocabulary.org/
There have been various bug reports on the matter since 2014. Some have been fixed by changing from Data-Vocabulary to Schema.org.
The deprecation of Data-Vocabulary is an important factor of the issue below because Schema.org has expanded for forum discussion and person while Data-Vocabulary is deprecated where the two conflict. Now the bug below:
Google refers to the following violations:
Some similar examples from the page Common Structured Data Errors:
By marking up only the Persons in a thread, the structured data appears irrelevant to the purpose of a thread. The Person data does not describe the thread; on its own, it is better suited to a profile page. To be relevant, each post should be scoped as a Comment, with the Person encapsulated as the post's author property, and the entire thread should be scoped as DiscussionForumPosting. This is a flaw in XenForo's usage of structured data.
Side note: The Structured Data Testing Tool only checks if the microdata is valid. Not how it is used. The microdata 'Person' exists so the tool does not highlight the errors.
Here is how the markup should be: https://schema.org/DiscussionForumPosting
Schema.org markup makes use of 'Author' markup in combination with 'Person', because the Person is the Author of a forum discussion post. The page is not about a Person. This is where the two conflict. See the example at the bottom how Reddit uses it.:
The solution here would be to add the correct microdata for DiscussionForumPosting.
XenForo advertises its microdata benefits on its homepage:
As you know for most microdata (not all) XenForo opted for Data-Vocabulary microdata markup which was abandoned in 2011 instead of Schema.org which is now the standard. See: http://www.data-vocabulary.org/
There have been various bug reports on the matter since 2014. Some have been fixed by changing from Data-Vocabulary to Schema.org.
The deprecation of Data-Vocabulary is an important factor of the issue below because Schema.org has expanded for forum discussion and person while Data-Vocabulary is deprecated where the two conflict. Now the bug below:
Google refers to the following violations:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/sd-policies
Some similar examples from the page Common Structured Data Errors:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/prototype#common-sd-errors
By marking up only the Persons in a thread, the structured data appears irrelevant to the purpose of a thread. The Person data does not describe the thread; on its own, it is better suited to a profile page. To be relevant, each post should be scoped as a Comment, with the Person encapsulated as the post's author property, and the entire thread should be scoped as DiscussionForumPosting. This is a flaw in XenForo's usage of structured data.
Side note: The Structured Data Testing Tool only checks if the microdata is valid. Not how it is used. The microdata 'Person' exists so the tool does not highlight the errors.
Here is how the markup should be: https://schema.org/DiscussionForumPosting
Schema.org markup makes use of 'Author' markup in combination with 'Person', because the Person is the Author of a forum discussion post. The page is not about a Person. This is where the two conflict. See the example at the bottom how Reddit uses it.:
Code:
<div itemid="http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2gypch/is_schemaorg_still_a_thing/" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/DiscussionForumPosting">
<h1 itemprop="headline">Is Schema.org still a thing?</h1>
<p>Author:
<span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
<span itemprop="name">haecceity123</span>
</span>
</p>
<div itemprop="interactionStatistic" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/InteractionCounter">
<link itemprop="interactionType" href="http://schema.org/CommentAction" />
<p>Comment count: <span itemprop="userInteractionCount">25</span></p>
</div>
</div>The solution here would be to add the correct microdata for DiscussionForumPosting.
XenForo advertises its microdata benefits on its homepage:
As the result of this Google Policy violation is severe and because its bad SEO advertised on the home page of XenForo, I am hoping for a solution in XF1.
Last edited:
