Google’s Latest Manual Action Penalty: Spammy Structured Markup

Google 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 actions help page on Google’s guidelines page.

A webmaster reported getting this in the Google forums.

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• Google Now Reports “Practically 100%” Of Manual Actions
• Google Charts “Manual Actions” Against Spam In Search For First Time
• Google Says “Snag” Has Taken Manual Spam Actions Viewer Offline
• Image Mismatch: The Latest Google Webmaster Tools Manual Action Penalty

Article Reference : Search Engine Journal