I added schema.org/person - suddenly Google Plus is using itemprop as Site TITLE ? Bug?

Question

I was wondering if anyone else ran into the same problem

This is the code I used

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
<li>Written by: <a rel="author" href="url"> <span itemprop="name">Name</span></a></li>
<li> <a itemprop="email" href="mailto:email@gmail.com">Contact</a></li>
</div>

It's very simple - when I paste a link on Google Plus it will use itemprop "name" as the Site title.

It works correctly on Facebook - just wondering why Google would do that before I run into problems, very annoying. The only alternative would be a vcard

Answer 1

I suspect it's because that Person schema is the only schema used on the page, so Google is assuming that the whole page is supposed to be about the person, and that all the other stuff around it is just irrelevant fluff, at least as far as microdata is concerned.

You may want to try marking the whole page as an Article or a Web Page or some other Creative Work, and marking the Person item as describing an author of that work (with itemprop="author").

Actually, the WebPage schema says that "every web page is implicitly assumed to be declared to be of type WebPage", so just adding itemprop="author" to your div might fix it:

<div itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
<li>Written by: <a rel="author" href="url"> <span itemprop="name">Name</span></a></li>
<li> <a itemprop="email" href="mailto:email@gmail.com">Contact</a></li>
</div>

Answer 2

If you are posting on Google+, it might help if you have set up the rel="author" (or rel="publisher") reciprocal links between the site and the G+ profile.

But that is just a guess, even though Google's terms now permit data sharing between their properties I don't know that it would extend to helping G+ instantaneously sort out something like that but it can't hurt...Ilmari's comment seemed pretty sound to me.