Google webmaster tools indicate few warnings in structured data, if your WordPress theme or website is not properly configured for latest standards. It is mandatory to get your authorship approved by Google if you are an author or publisher on a blog or website. Also the data for content date and author must be properly configured so that Google may properly index and crawl your website. Without this, Google will drop rankings of your website and will crawl your website less often. Also your latest posts may not be indexed for long time if you miss these settings for your website or blog. Here is how you eliminate these errors.
The errors are generally the following:
Warning: Atleast one field must be set for “HCard”.
Warning: Missing required field “name (fn)”.
Warning: Missing required field “updated”.
Or
Missing required fields “updated”, “entry-title” and “author”.
What you have to do is to verify your authorship from Google by creating a Google Plus page and mention your website (where you write articles) URL in the profile.
Link your Google+ profile to the content you create
Create a link to your Google profile from your webpage, like this:
<a href="[profile_url]?rel=author" rel="author">Google</a> |
Replace [profile_url] with the your Google Profile URL, like this:
<a href="https://plus.google.com/*************?rel=author">Google</a> |
Your link must contain the ?rel=author parameter. If it’s missing, Google won’t be able to associate your content with your Google profile.
You can also add link tag in head section of website if the website or blog contains a single author. Like below:
<link href="https://plus.google.com/****************/" rel="publisher author"/> |
Warning: Missing required field “entry-title”
This error occurs when Google snippet cannot find the title of post.
Replace
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1> |
with
<h1 class="title single-title entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1> |
Warning: Missing required field “updated”
This error occur when Google Snippet cannot find date it was published or last updated.
To fix it, find:
<span class="post_date"><?php the_time('j F,Y'); ?></span> |
and replace it with
<span class="post_date date updated"><?php the_time('j F,Y'); ?></span> |
Warning: Missing required hCard “author”
This error occur when Google is unable to find the author of the post. This part use elements from hCard microformat which are “vcard” and “fn”.
To solve this, Find:
<?php the_author(); ?> |
and replace it with;
<span class=”vcard author”><span class=”fn”><?php the_author(); ?></span></span> |