Google Warns About Event Markup Abuse May Result in Manual Action

[engine]

Google has warned over misuse of Event markup [webmasters.googleblog.com] whereby coupons or vouchers are showing up in search, instead of the events. This also applies to any non-event items being annotated with the event markup.
It says it'll take manual action and report it in the Search Console, and may result in structured data for the whole site in question not being used in SERPs.

Here's and example


Event markup information [developers.google.com...]

[Shepherd]

Let me be the first to say... This is why we can't have nice things.

[keyplyr]

Agreed - if there is a way to game the system, someone will try it... making it bad for those that play by the rules.

[Shepherd]

We've eliminated almost all of the UGC on our site, just got to be too much of a PITA. It's a real shame, we had some really good forum/Q&A content but the upkeep was ridiculous. I'm sure I'm telling the Mods/Admins here anything they don't already know...

[moTi]

has anyone in here implemented this event markup?

i have a big event website but i'm neither interested in improving google's services at my expense nor necessarily gaining event visitors as i have no business relation to the hosts.

so i'd solely like to know if there are noticable benefits for the event publisher in terms of serp visibility and clickthroughs. any experiences?

[iamlost]

What it illustrates, once again, is that Google's vaunted machine learning search algorithms are relatively easily gamed and that real world data sets are extremely dirty, even with (especially because of?) explicit markup; to humans an obvious attack vector.

Ever since RankBrain was, according to G, broadly/universally rolled out query 'understanding' has patently gone down the crapper. Now we see an inability to handle corrupt/dirty named data inputs. Serious problems in the ML/algo backend.
Note: I know several of the Googlers working with ML and they are definitely brilliant capable folk; however, perhaps some things are being released to a next step prematurely. Or they are not sufficiently thinking as hackers.

[timemachined]

Thanks for the information. It would be fair to suggest that a limited time discount would be an event that is dictated by time and therefore could be used in this way. And is definitely useful to the person enquiring. Obviously Google doesn't agree, however as it has been gamed for 18 months in this way, one believes G to be late to notice. I will not be using such methods and will await my rise as those around me fall.