[Easy Fix] Unparsable Structured Data Warning in Google Search Console

Today I’m gonna go over 1 scenario where we can do an easy fix to get rid of the ‘unparsable structured data issues detected on…” warning.

A few weeks ago, I got about 10 of these warnings all at once. In every single one of the cases it was due to an extra comma at the end of the JSON-LD syntax.

After getting the email, I checked out one of my hobby sites to see what could be done. GSC tells me I’m missing an end curly brace or object member name. That seems highly unlikely.

So I grab all the code from the site, and throw it into Google Structured Data testing tool. I can see right away this doesn’t conform to the new standards. The comma has to go.

Remove the comma, instant validation.

After making the fix, I “validated the fix” and it took a bit of time, I believe overnight.

And finally, a validated fix:

That’s it!

TLDR; If you get a random “unparsable structured data issues detected on…” from Google Search Console, it is definitely a syntax error, and most likely an extra comma at the end of your script. Remove the comma and you should be golden.

Structured Data: WebPage vs WebSite

We get this question asked enough where we thought we should post about it. I am going to keep it extremely simple.

So what is the difference between the “website” and “webpage” @type JSON-LD code.

WebSite: Refers to the entire domain

e.g. https://example.com

WebPage: Refers to a particular page on that domain.

e.g. https://example.com/products/my-product
e.g. https://example.com/blog/my-blog-post
e.g. https://example.com/about/our-team

You can view sample code for WebSite and WebPage right here.

Embedding JSON-LD in Blogger / Blogspot

We recently received an email from a jsonld.com fan with a very common question, so I thought I’d address it on our blog. Going to keep it short and sweet.

Roberto asked:

In short, he wanted to know if it is possible to insert JSON-LD into a Blogspot. I wasn’t sure, so I gave it a try with a very old blogspot account I had laying around from the olden days.

Switch from “compose” to “HTML” and insert your JSON-LD. Save your work and hit “publish” or “save.”

 

A lot of website builder frameworks strip out <scripts> so I wasn’t sure if it would pass, but low and behold it did!

It isn’t ideal to keep the script inside the body, but this works. I’m not sure if it is possible to insert a script “sitewide” in Blogger, if someone knows it better than I do, let me know and I’ll update this post.

Also if you know of a better way to insert JSON-LD in a Blogger / Blogspot feel free to reach out!

Thank you all.

Snooping on The Web’s Top JSON-LD Snippets

We thought it would be a cool idea to check out and catalog some of the web’s top JSON-LD snippets, since everyone is so hot for it right now. We were surprised to find so many sites still using the “old” schema style. We were quite impressed with many sites implementations, and a bit underwhelmed by a few others. Either way check out what we got and let us know what you think or if there is anything else cool you think I should add.

NBC News

NBC news has what we consider “par for the course” markup on their site.

SEER Interactive Homepage

Seer Interactive also has standard and valid markup.

Moz Homepage

Moz has several JSON-LD Snippets on their homepage, some of which gave some “warnings” but all of it is well implemented otherwise.

Business Insider’s “Best Electric Razor” Page

We wanted to find a cool example of some schema that yielded a nice SERP snippet, and thought this was a great example. See “best electric razor” (or screenshot)

Coinmarketcap.com’s Homepage

Some pretty standard markup on the homepage, but checkout the next example for a really cool implementation.

Coinmarketcap.com’s Litecoin Listing
It appears as though CMC dynamically generates its json-ld, as you can see the “price” field is dynamic and reflects the current price of Litecoin. Very cool, even though it doesn’t pass Google’s validator.

Showtime Anytime Web App

The Showtime Anytime Web App added some search schema in an attempt to get the “search box” within the SERPs. Bonus points for comments 🙂

Basecamp Homepage

Basecamp has some very well formatted JSON-LD, and a few different types to boot.

Raventools Blog Post

Raven has lots of different JSON-LD throughout their site, including on their blog posts.

Ahrefs Blog Post
Some weird stuff in this snippet, like HTML tag but that could be a computed error.

Yoast Blog Post
At 132 lines this is probably one of the larger JSON-LD snippets on this list. And of course they “branded” their snippet with a JS class…just lovely.

Yoast Homepage

Quickbooks Homepage
Quickbooks has some nicely formatted json-ld, and a whole lotta “same-as’s”

Cloudflare Homepage
In true Cloudflare fashion, their JSON-LD is in the footer.

SEJ blog post

SEJ Homepage

Taste of Home Grilled Turkey Burger Recipe

Thought it would be cool to throw in a “recipe” type, well done! (pun intended)

Ticketmaster Celine Dion:
On a typical Ticketmaster page, they use Breadcrumb and obviously event markup ,and quite a bit more!

Udemy Product and Course JSON-LD
I scoured the web (ok I looked for about 3 minutes) looking for “course” JSON-LD and finally thought to look on Udemy. Sure enough, they were smart enough to use course snippet. Sadly, I don’t think Google uses the course type as of yet, but who knows.

Just to note, while we were looking for examples we came across a few “big” sites still not using JSON-LD. Not criticizing these sites, as larger sites are generally a lot harder to switch structured data types than smaller ones.
-hubspot
-reddit
-hackernews
-stack exchange
-Google’s Developer Help on JSON-LD

Have any more examples? Let us know in the comments or tweet @pmkoom

Google Loves JSON-LD #SEO

If you’ve been around the SEO community for a while, you’ve probably noticed that the latest and greatest structured data type is JSON-LD.

In 2016 at SMX East in NYC, Gary Illyes at Google confirmed that Google was expanding their existing support for JSON-LD across more categories within Google search engine.

If you go to any conference right now, you’ll most likely hear a talk about schema markup, structured data, and of course JSON-LD.

Google is already very vocal about their support for JSON-LD and has even included it within their developer documentation suite. In fact, they didn’t just include it in their documentation but as of December 2015, it appears as though they’ve switched it to their default structured data type.

In addition to their developer documentation, they also mentioned JSON-LD in their AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages Project) which John Mueller of Google touted “the hottest new thing for 2016.”

As of December 2015, Google has mandated that all article schema must contain the author tag, which they recommend using JSON-LD. Cyrus Shepard from Moz noticed this and felt it was necessary to tweet about it.

There are a number of other ways Google search has been using JSON-LD recently. They’ve recently opened up access to the Knowledge Graph via Freebase via Google Knowledge Graph API and guess what it spits out? JSON-LD.

In January of 2016, they’ve added support for JSON-LD in review snippets. This was a big move for JSON-LD in the fact that review snippets are one of Google’s more popular types of snippet.

What Type of Schema Does Google Want You To Use:

In March of 2019, John Mueller of Google did a Webmaster Hangout (video) and was asked the following:

Someone asked the following question:

“What type of Schema markup is preferable for Google?

John Mueller answered:

“We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new structured data that are kind of come out for JSON-LD first. So that is what we prefer.”

I don’t think many people are surprised about this after all the bulk of the SEO community has been using JSON-LD for the last few years.