Recovered from Spammy Structured Markup Penalty: How I Helped a UK-Based Business Increase Website Visits
I was working at Prateek Technosoft India Pvt Ltd company when I helped one of our clients recover from a Spammy Structured Markup penalty. The client, "Jewels-Airport-Transfers," is a UK-based business that was facing a significant drop in website visits. When I audited their website, I found two major issues: a doorway page issue and a Spammy Structured Data problem caused by the previous SEO agency's incorrect guidance.
The Spammy Structured Data issue was confirmed by using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool, which showed 11 errors and 5 warnings, as well as the disappearance of the site's rich snippets in organic search. I had access to the Google Webmaster Tool (Google Search Console) to monitor the structured data report. The Search Console notification read, "Spammy structured data for http://www.jewels-airport-transfers.co.uk/ might be dropped from search results."
Screenshot 1: "This Spammy Structured Markup penalty is a form of manual penalty."
In March 2015, Google updated its rating and reviews Rich Snippet policies, stating that these types of snippets must be placed only on specific items, not on "category" or "list of items" landing pages.
The following report (on below screenshot 2 image) shows our client website's Structured Data indexation and errors, which include an aggregate of reviews for all products and incorrectly highlighted local and article pages.
Screenshot 2:
I worked with our developers to fix the errors and remove the overall schema markups that were not aligned with Google's most recent guidelines. I also unpublished the local and article pages and tested the markup using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool before republishing it on the site.
Screenshot 3:
Before submitting a reconsideration request, I made sure that no pages were blocked on our site's robots.txt file.
Screenshot 4:
I then submitted the reconsideration request on the Google Webmaster Tool.
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