Google Penalty for Rich Snippets

Are you in eCommerce business or into eCommerce website online marketing? In both cases you must be aware of Rich Snippets.

As an online marketer are you using rich snippets for the websites? If yes then the next question you should ask yourself is that are you implementing it correctly. Have you find any error or warning in your webmaster account regarding the same.

I am talking about it because Google has started to penalize websites for spamming structured data markup.  It’s a manual action penalty based on incorrect usage of structured markup. It’s being a penalty whether you are doing it as spam or by mistake.

If you are doing it incorrectly then you’ll find a manual action taken by Google and can see the message in your webmaster account as:

“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.”

 

About Rich Snippet Penalty

When talking about Rich snippet penalty back in October Matt Cutts said

Rich snippets could get a revamp and they will dial back on the number of websites that will be able to display rich snippets. “More reputable websites will get rich snippets while less reputable ones will see their removed”.

The new penalty of Rich Snippets is going to affect the sites which are misusing the rich snippets. The misuse includes authorship on homepage, markup for hidden content etc.

If you are interested in using the structured markup then you should understand it clearly. If you any doubts of how to use it? Then follow the webmaster guidelines for the same at https://support.google.com/webmasters/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=21997. Check your webmaster accounts for any kind of errors and penalty about the rich snippets.

Use structured data markup correctly on your website for the best results as well as to avoid the Google rich snippet penalty.