XF 1.3 Microdata tags, Google not recognizing?

Kevin

Kevin

Well-known member
So I have an afternoon obsession today with the microdata tags. Below is a link of an example thread at one of my sites that I'm trying to get a 'clean' schema test from.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/to...-book-on-amazon-rocket-babe-dust-storm.17945/

As you can see in the results I'm getting an error, "Error: If this markup is about a person, at least 2 of the following fields are needed: organization, location, or role. See the people help page for more information.", even though I do have role (title) and location (address) appearing.

Is the problem that the XF Location field only shows as "address" and does not drill down further, like to "locality", or is there something else I'm not seeing? :confused:
 
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Jeremy said:
I only see role, I'm not sure "address" counts for location.
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From the "person" spec page (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146646?hl=en) there is no unique "location" tag, only "address" with optional detail tags.
Google said:
The location of the person. Can have the subproperties street-address, locality, region, postal-code, and country-name.
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From that page they specify there also that for the "person" identifier that at least 2 of the 3 following tags are required.
  • title or role
  • affiliation (org)
  • address
Right now the "title" tags are coming from the users custom title & group banners while "role" is coming from the "Occupation" value on their profile page and "address" is coming from the "Location" value on their profile page. Experimenting a bit, if I supply all three tags (title/role, affiliation, & address) then I don't get an error.

Earlier I was doing a bunch of Google searches and people reporting the same error were ultimately resolving their issues by changing their HTML code but I'm not seeing anything wrong with how the default XF tags are being generated.
 
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Kevin said:
Is the problem that the XF Location field only shows as "address" and does not drill down further, like to "locality", or is there something else I'm not seeing? :confused:
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It looks like this is the issue.

"Address" is a microdata type (http://www.data-vocabulary.org/Address/) and not a property. The properties of "address" are...
  • street-address
  • locality (city)
  • region (state)
  • postal-code (zip code)
  • country-name
Changing itemprop="address" to itemprop="region" eliminates the error. Of course it opens up a bunch of other issues since "Location" in the user control panel is free form and could have any value in there.
 
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Kevin said:
Of course it opens up a bunch of other issues since "Location" in the user control panel is free form and could have any value in there.
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I think that should be changed into preset values, with the correct item properties attributed to those values. If users can opt to select a country, state and city then the correct microdata tags can be attributed.
 
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Alfa1 said:
I think that should be changed into preset values, with the correct item properties attributed to those values. If users can opt to select a country, state and city then the correct microdata tags can be attributed.
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Which is what I'm likely to do longer term. It was bugging the heck out of me that the microdata was not validating so for the short term I wanted to find out 'Why?' first. Now that I understand the problem I can start working on a resolution.
 
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Optimally there would be multiple fields. The user would first need to select the country, then the other drop downs load with the correct state and cities. I don't think a street address is desired for forums.
Personally I would only need countries & states.
 
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I'm currently talking to a developer to have this created. The approach that is proposed is as follows:
create an area in the Admin CP where you could pre-define a location. It would have a title (e.g. "Texas, USA") which would be what the user would select/see, and for each title you would be able to define the address properties (e.g., region: "Texas", country-name: "United States").

Let me know if you want in on this and what requirements you have.
 
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