Google Authorship conflicts with Comments/Reviews Author

Business Marketing & SEO
1

Today, while using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool I found that my Authorship Email Verification fails to match on my name when a customer has left a review on the page.

I'm testing a Page. It contains my by line linked to my Google+ account with “?rel=author” in the link.

The customer's review has a CS-Cart CSS class named “post-author” in its span tag.



Authorship is Working on the webpage with the Google+ link (as reported by the testing tool), and I am email verified on the domain.



The only problem is that when there is a comment by a customer - the Testing Tool reads the customer's name and reports that the email verification name doesn't match the name on the page:

________________________________________________

Automatically detected author name on webpage: Sam Spade.

Error: Author name found on the page and Google+ profile name do not match.

________________________________________________



This must be occurring because Google is finding and reading the “post-author” class and interpreting it as Authorship meta data (author name).

If I delete the comment/review, the problem goes away.



I might add that the most recent Google crawl and re-indexing (after the review was added to the page) has updated my SE results and now the Google+ profile data (image, name, etc.) have been omitted from the results - which sucks.



Any suggestions?

2

I'll can confirm that this Authorship Verification problem also exists for Products with Reviews.



I will add that Google+ “?rel=publisher” is also included (in the footer of all pages, products, homepage, etc.) and is verified.

3

I'm considering replacing the entire CS-Cart Reviews addon with this:

CS-Cart Facebook Connect Addon - CartTuning



But… then there is no Review Aggregating in the Meta Data.

4

If you have the microdata declaration for reviews already in your templates (which you presumably do since you're testing them)*, you should easily be able to resolve this by replacing the reviewers name (“Sam Spade”) with the following in:-



/skins/basic/customer/addons/discussion/views/discussion/view.tpl



Replace:-

{$post.name|escape}

With:-

{$post.name|escape}


5

Thanks!

That's a much better solution than I applied.

I just renamed the class to “post-name” and it fixed the problem. I'll undo that and apply your fix.



I'm not currently including “reviewer” (or an actual review “count”) in my metadata - I don't have a function to perform that. I have a “fn_get_average_rating” function for the average rating, and I fake the count so the default minimum data is present. I don't know how to gather the “count” of reviews or define the “review” and “reviewer”. I don't think that function is in CS-Cart.



BTW, this same change needs to be applied to testimonials.tpl in \customer\addons\discussion\blocks\

6

“review” - just add an if, use the call for “product name” for the product page and “page name - company name” for pages, that's what I would do anyway unless somebody can offer a better solution…?



“reviewer” - use the customers name as it is a required field when submitting a review anyway.



The “count” I assume you mean the total number of individual reviews for a given product? The count is definitely available as I have used it before, as is the average rating which iirc is just ratings divide by count.

7

I can't figure out how to get the “count” (total number of reviews) out of CS-Cart. It must be a variable in the addon somewhere…

8

http://www.alt-team.com/cs-cart-extended-reviews-add-on.html



http://goo.gl/WLM0R

9

Thanks JesseLee I may end up going that route…



Looking at the discussion addon's func.php script it looks like CS-Cart calculates an average for the aggregated review value, but doesn't perform a count in any query. I find this function:

function fn_get_average_rating($object_id, $object_type)
{
$discussion = fn_get_discussion($object_id, $object_type);
if (empty($discussion) || ($discussion['type'] != 'R' && $discussion['type'] != 'B')) {
return false;
}
return db_get_field("SELECT AVG(a.rating_value) as val FROM ?:discussion_rating as a LEFT JOIN ?:discussion_posts as b ON a.post_id = b.post_id WHERE a.thread_id = ?i and b.status = 'A'", $discussion['thread_id']);
}



I added this function:

function fn_get_rating_count($object_id, $object_type)
{
$discussion = fn_get_discussion($object_id, $object_type);
if (empty($discussion) || ($discussion['type'] != 'R' && $discussion['type'] != 'B')) {
return false;
}
return db_get_field("SELECT COUNT(*) as count FROM ?:discussion_rating as a LEFT JOIN ?:discussion_posts as b ON a.post_id = b.post_id WHERE a.thread_id = ?i and b.status = 'A'", $discussion['thread_id']);
}