Fixed hatom and hentry errors once and for all - without touching the code

byRahman786

522 followers

9 years ago

I have been getting hatom errors on google web master tools for a while now. The errors are Missing Author and Missing Updated. I tried to look for a solution here on WA, but could not find one. Either the solution was to ignore them or it was outdated. Searched on the internet and it involved changes in the code which was again different for different themes, and I could not find the exact files to edit for my particular theme. Also broke my entire site once doing that.

I decided not to give up and kept looking as I read somewhere that Hatom was developed for Google only. One solution was not to use these classes but that again I thought Google might not like it. So finally I found a solution that did not involve changes in the code and fixed the errors smoothly without affecting anything else.

The solution is the plugin " All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets" as shown below.

Once you have the plugin installed and activated, you need to go to webmaster tools and find out which pages/posts it is giving you the hatom error on. Normally they are pages that google is looking for author. In my case it was my Home page that Google was looking a summary for.

Open the concerned page in WordPress and scroll down to bottom just above the SEO settings. You will find the rich snippet settings as below.

Select the type according to the content of your page. It can be an article or item review or service and depends on the content of the page. Remember to fill in all the fields including images if it asks for any, else google will give you another error.

Save your page and on the top of the window, click on "view page", which you might have done many times. You will see the link on the preview page as below. Click on Test Rich Snippets.

This will take you to google webmaster tools. give it the URL of your page and test live data. All errors should disappear now for that particular page.

Keep in mind that the Rich Snippet plugin puts a summary box at the end of your page in body section just above the footer. You can actually configure these settings to match the color and theme of your site but you cannot remove it as Google requires them to be clearly visible. Mine looked like below after changing the color settings. You can configure these settings in word press left bar where an Icon will appear "Rich Snippets" after you install the plugin. Click this and go to customization.

I hope this will help a lot of people. I have spent a lot of time looking for a solution and wanted to share my experience with you guys.

If you want to see it live, go to the bottom of my homepage.

http://funbinary.com