Structured data issue

Hi @svaults

We understand you are receiving a report from SEMrush on the error message of ‘A value for the item.name or name field is required for a nested ListItem’.

We’ve checked with our developers and in-house SEO experts, and they’ve confirmed that this is not an actual error being reported by Google Search Console, Google’s Rich Results, or Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. This seems to be a “false alert” related specifically to how SEMrush and ahref parse the data. We have already reached out to both companies to resolve the issue, but believe that for now, it’s safe to ignore this alert.

However, would it be possible for you to provide a sample URL where this issue is occurring for one of your websites, just so we can rule out that there are indeed no errors appearing in Google’s SDTT and that this isnt’ just a specific use-case? You can also test it in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool and confirm if there are no error messages appearing.

Thanks for the reply @mikes41720.

In the other thread with this topic, someone mentioned they reached out to SEMRush who said this is a legitimate error and that the other tools just haven’t been updated in a while. That is to say: Google does expect the name field and that there would be a penalty.

Why are breadcrumbs even forced by the Yoast plugin?

We’re considering just migrating to a different SEO plugin without this issue but that is a pain in itself. Can the devs not provide an option to add the name field to the breadcrumbs or remove them completely?

Hi @svaults

As per the comment here, we recently changed how the final entry of our breadcrumb lists are generated. They now reference the current webpage (via an @id relationship). This declares that that item is the same entity as the current webpage. As such, that entry does have a name (and a URL, and all of the other properties of the webpage). Some tools, like SEMrush, fail to traverse that relationship (i.e., they just look for a string match), and thus throw a warning. More sophisticated tools (like GSC, and Google’s RRT) handle it fine. We’re in contact with several such tool vendors to try and help them refine/fix their detection.

Were you able to check a specific URL being reported by SEMrush as having this error and running it in Google’s SDTT and confirming that no errors show up? Or if you could provide us with a URL so we can try and check on this further.

We generate the breadcrumb schema in the Yoast SEO schema.org structured data markup as we believe it to be beneficial for websites. If you would like to disable the breadcrumb schema, you can refer to our schema API documentation here – https://developer.yoast.com/features/schema/api

• This reply was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by Michael Ti?a.

I have the same large list of errors in SEMRush, but all of those URL’s check out just fine on the Google Rich Data Testing Tool (they are deprecating the Structured Data Testing Tool).
Example URL I testing and shows the error in SEMRush:
https://www.ufcinc.com/10-factors-to-consider-when-selecting-a-document-scanner

SEMRush Error:
A value for the item.name or name field is required for a nested ListItem.

Google Rich Data Tool Test Result shows all OK:
Rich Data Test Result

@jimhill10 We have already reached out to Semrush about it and hopefully, we’ll fix the issue together!

Hi,

We’ll be setting this issue to resolved due to inactivity. Please do monitor for updates from SEMrush from time to time, as we can confirm that the Yoast SEO plugin schema is showing correctly in Google’s RRT & SDTT.