Errors in Google search console: A simple way to solve them!

byAngelsBird

2.1K followers

Updated 8 years ago

Hello,

I am talking about the errors that look like this, see image below, the hAtom Markup: microformats.org errors.

I just add some explanation about what hAtom actually is, but only for the people who are interested...
If your only interested in the solution, which I can understand, scroll down till you see "The Solution". :-)

You can find those errors in the Google search console under Search Appearance - Structured Data.

What is hAtom?

hAtom is a draft Microformat for marking up (X)HTML, using classes and rel attributes, content on web pages that contain blog entries or similar chronological content. These can then be parsed as feeds in Atom, a web syndication standard.

Are those errors important: Your website does not have any problem because does errors are there, they have no influence on your website itself.
BUT: If Google is testing for hAtom microformat in web pages, then it would be wise to assume that it must play a part in how Google indexes blog articles using microformats.

If you want more info about hAtom:
http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom
http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom-examples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAtom

Below you can see an image of a page that has 2 errors:

If you click on the page name and in the next screen on Test live data, you will see the screen below:

It appears "all to be good" and you see entry-title and entry-content are filled in.

But the problem is not fixed because Google wants 4 entries: Title, Content, Author, and Updated.

The Solution (stop scrolling!):

You go to the dashboard of the site you want to fix.

First copy the text below:

//add hatom data

function add_suf_hatom_data($content) {

$t = get_the_modified_time('F jS, Y');

$author = get_the_author();

$title = get_the_title();

if (is_home() || is_singular() || is_archive() ) {

$content .= '<div class="hatom-extra" style="display:none;visibility:hidden;"><span class="entry-title">'.$title.'</span> was last modified: <span class="updated"> '.$t.'</span> by <span class="author vcard"><span class="fn">'.$author.'</span></span></div>';

}

return $content;

}

add_filter('the_content', 'add_suf_hatom_data');

Click appearance and in the menu that appears click editor.

In this new window that is open, you select functions.php and in the middle of the page on the right-hand side.

When you clicked it the text appears in the content window, we now will add an extra function.
You go to the bottom of the page and at the end of the last sentence you put your cursor, then you hit the enter button twice.

Now you right-click on that line and click on paste (or ctrl + V), the text that you just copied above, should appear.

Next you click on "update file" and everything is OK.

You can log off your website.

Within a couple of days, all your errors will be gone in your Google search console.

People that were only interested in the solution can now stop reading... ;-)

The others they go back to the Google Search console and repeat the action we did before:
You click on the page name where you see there were 2 errors and in the next screen on Test live data.
Again Google is fetching the page and the result is:

You can see at the right side that we have the 4 entries that Google wants to have an error free Search Console.

And at the left side (selected text) you can see that a line with "hentry" is added, this is the line that adds all the info we declared in the Functions.php.

That's it for now, I hope you liked the tip...

Grtz,

Bert