Schema.org/SPAM – Google Should Get Rid of All of It

I have a client who had implemented schema incorrectly and received a notice from Google that they needed to fix it “if you would like it featured in Google search results”. Of course they didn’t provide any specifics and Schema.org documentation is often confusing:

http://t.co/ltB6NKX0eX‘s real mission was to create a lot of confusing conversations about how to implement schema

— Andrew Shotland (@localseoguide) June 19, 2014

Then I noticed this very helpful review of Wisconsin Health Insurance, because so many people, well at least 2, are reviewing Wisconsin Health Insurance, which is actually not anything…except a valuable keyword of course:

And if you look at the URL in Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool, er, I mean the Structured Data Testing Tool, you see that it employs hreview-Aggregate markup:

And if you look on the URL, you’ll see a sentence about these ratings nicely tucked away on the right hand side of the page, where it’s sure to be really really helpful to users:

A few weeks ago Google did away with author images in the SERPs “to make the experience better” or some such thing. And while the message Google sent to my client shows it is clearly trying to clean up the schema SPAM, I have seen way too much of this crap in the SERPs.

I vote for getting rid of all of it.