Podcast Schema Overwriting Article Website Post Schema?

Thank you for contacting Semrush!

Per Google Doc, startDate is a required property for Event.

As it turns out, our Semrush tool only detects a top level structure data type and checks the Google documentation for it.

After cURLing the pages mentioned , our bot saw that the page has implemented OnDemandEvent(seen here)which is the subtype of Event.

We can see that OnDemandEvent doesn’t have startDate and that is why our tool is flagging these Invalid structured data items.

As the tool states, this issue is triggered if structured data items contain fields that do not meet Google’s guidelines. 

If your website markup has errors, crawlers will not be able to properly understand it, and you may run the risk of losing the chance of gaining rich snippets and getting more favorable rankings.
For more information on the structured data requirements, see schema.org, Google documentation, or our article.

We recommend checking structured data on your webpages with a validation tool and double checking with Google documentation. Please note that different markup testing tools may show different results. We recommend that you use the Rich Results Test tool to review and validate your pages’ structured data against their rich snippet requirements. For recommendations on how to actually implement these changes to address this issue, we recommend you reach out to your website administrator, as we are unable to consult on this stage in the process since it is outside of our expertise. We are here to spot the actual issues on our side, and beyond the Why and How to Fix It portion provided for each issue, the next step for the user would be either implementing any changes to their site manually or being assisted by an outside source.

Best,

Hi @mtnweekly,

Thank you for the heads up, we’ll investigate this issue. Also, the podcast-related schema should appear only for the SSP-related pages. Could you make sure that you didn’t enable redundant Post types in Podcasting -> Settings -> General -> Podcast post type?

Thanks for looking into this. There is nothing selected under Podcast Post types. Here is what Yoast Said: 

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your reply

We understand you are facing the Seriously Simple Podcasting is adding the schema for podcast into every post and this is messing with Google. I am sorry for the situation you are facing. We are here to help.

Yoast SEO doesn't add structured data for podcasts.

Kindly know that we’ve given the team Seriously Simple Podcasting an API so that they can add their Schema to our graph. So, Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin integrates with the Yoast SEO Schema API and makes sure their specific Schema is added to our Schema graph, and ties in properly.

So, kindly contact the author of the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin to take a look at this for you. I understand this is hassle for you, however, this has to be fixed from the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin.

I am sorry for not being more positive with this answer.




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Thanks and regards,
Mushrit

--
Mushrit Shabnam
Support Engineer at Yoast

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We believe bad schema has resulted in Google removing most all of our content. W have seen organic traffic from from 80,000 clicks a month to 6,000 and the timing is in line with when we started using your plugin.

I would really like to get this fixed. I’m a paid customer. Yoast is blaming your plugin for this, all of our Google rankings have disappeared. I believe your plugin inserting schema onto 900+ product review pages caused our ranking to suffer. It doesn’t seem like there is an easy fix here. I trusted in your service and trusted in Yoast, both seem to be letting us down. I wonder how many other users have had this effect their website without even knowing. I had to find this via SEMrush digging deep.

Hi @mtnweekly,

I’m really sorry to hear you’re experiencing this issue, and I hope we can fix it as soon as possible.
As a first step, could you ensure that no checkbox is checked in Podcasting -> Settings -> General -> Podcast post type?

If it doesn’t help, I’ll provide you with further instructions.

There is nothing currently toggled in that settings. I believe Post had been used in the past. Thanks for looking into this. Something I need to fix ASAP

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by Mike H.

@mtnweekly

Thank you for the information. If there is nothing toggled in that setting, It actually should NOT affect any other post types except Podcast. Anyway, thank you for the heads up, we decided to remove the OnDemandEvent type entirely, despite the Yoast team recommending us to use it.

I’ll make a new plugin version with this fix as soon as possible.

I truly appreciate you looking into this and seeing how a change can be applied. Excited for the new plugin version. Any thoughts on how we can update Google?

Hi @mtnweekly,

We released the version 3.1.1 that should fix your issue. I’m not sure if there is any possibility to update Google, I guess it will be done automatically in a few days.