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 […]

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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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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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