Google has posted a blog entry about misleading event markup code. Appearantly, Google has been receiving feedback from users seeing non-events like coupons or vouchers showing up in search results where “events” snippets appear:
“We’ve seen a number of publishers in the coupons/vouchers space use the “event” markup to describe their offers. And as much as using a discount voucher can be a very special thing, that doesn’t make coupons or vouchers events or “saleEvents”.
Using Event markup to describe something that is not an event creates a bad user experience, by triggering a rich result for something that will happen at a particular time, despite no actual event being present.”
Google penalizes markup spam
If Google detects fake markup code on your website, they might take manual action:
“Since this creates a misleading user experience, we may take manual action on such cases. In case your website is affected by such a manual action, you will find a notification in your Search Console account. If a manual action is taken, it can result in structured data markup for the whole site not being used for search results.
While we’re specifically highlighting coupons and vouchers in this blogpost, this applies to all other non-event items being annotated with “event” markup as well — or, really, for applying a type of markup to something other than the type of thing it is meant to describe.”
Do not use fake markup code on your web pages. Only use markup code that refers to the content of the page. The Rich Snippet Creator in SEOprofiler can help you to do that:
