butterfruit
Forum Replies Created
-
I came here to complain about the same. I have been using wpforms for a couple of years now; and suddenly (over the past one month) there is a steep increase in spambot spam through the wpforms contact form.
I have enabled recaptcha, but the spammers seem to be routinely bypassing it.
The spam is originating from a single company / spambot since the name field has a specific pattern in all these spam mails :
DickXMVI SdvillBedHE elSeeVaxNZ BeelineAluncQE TysonFuckyNDNotice the lack of any spaces and the last few characters are always in upper case. Also, the email IDs used are usually either Gmail IDs or a .ru email ID.
The spam has increased very significantly over the past couple of days and we had to disable the contact forms completely. Is the recaptcha working at all ? Is there any other solution to this ?
Just realized that this is issue has been discussed and solved in another thread as ‘stats’.
Looks like version 2.0.17 is not pushed out to the updates yet.
Thank you !
@andyt1980 since I don’t consider myself to be an expert, I will look forward to @dudo to guide us on any possible options to retain the stars while complying with the rules.
My two cents are as below :
While the rating stars will not be displayed anymore, I would still suggest keeping the entire current schema intact. (Unless you can justify changing it to a different schema type within the rules.)
The stars are displayed only when the aggregateRating is accompanied with the other details required for a valid schema.
In other words, any schema will work fine without the stars, but the stars will work only with the supported schema types.
If aggregateRating is included in a unsupported schema type, it results in an error message and no stars, but there are no manual penalties.
The schema will still help in normal SEO to an extent and is still relevant.
After reading about this issue for a whole day, I have decided to retain the schema as is for all the pages, except a few course pages where I can justify using a ‘Course’ schema.
For the past couple of days, I am seeing a dip in traffic, so the stars (or lack thereof) does make a difference.
- This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by butterfruit.
@andyt1980 Given that CreativeWork, Article, BlogPosting and even Service schema types will not show stars anymore, I am not sure if Cycling Routes can be classified among the few schema types that are on the new list.
The closest I could think of was an ‘event’ schema. If the Cycling Route can be described as an open ended event of sorts. You can probably try the event schema, immediately test the post on the Structured Data testing tool and check out what other inputs need to be specified for ‘event’.
If only Google had retained Article and/or BlogPosting, it would have made things easier.
On a lighter note, ‘Recipe’ is a schema that supports stars, so you should probably turn each Cycling Route into a recipe. i.e. Carry some raw ingredients at the beginning of the trip and make a salad or an omelette at the end of the trip ??
@dudo Your caution is absolutely valid. Adding / using incompatible or misleading schemas may result in manual penalties.
As seen in the link above (see the errors in the test tool), BlogPosting doesn’t work with Aggregate ratings anymore since Google has changed the rich snippets criteria.
Similarly CreativeWork and Article also don’t work anymore and give the same error.
This rich-snippets issue & Google change is affecting all the popular rating stars plugins – YASR, KK Star ratings, GD Rating System and Rate my Post.
As per the Google webmasters posting, ratings will be displayed only for a specific set of schemas.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/making-review-rich-results-more-helpful.html
So, for the ratings plugins to work, they will have to allow selection of specific schema types for each type of post; and allow additional information to be plugged in.
For example, in my site, I have general articles and also specific posts that are selling some courses. Visitors / Users have an option of voting on all the pages and everything was using the ‘CreativeWork’ schema.
Now, that stars will not be visible for ‘CreativeWork’, I will need to segregate all posts into ‘Article’ and ‘Course’ categories.
‘Article’ may still have the star ratings, but they will not be visible in rich snippets. Whereas the courses will need to have ‘Course’ schema. If ‘Course’ is used, Google will require additional details to be available; such as ‘Provider’, ‘Description’ etc.
So, for any star rating plugin to be useful, it should allow more post level control.