Webmasters hentry error and authorless pages

Question

Within Google Webmasters Search Appearance → Structured Data I'm getting a series of errors:

Error: Missing required hCard "author".

And most of my 44 errors have:

Missing: Author
Missing: entry-title
Missing: updated

There seems to be no CLEAR explanation of these errors. It is either because these classes exist without their nested classes, or they are expected to exist because of something else, possibly itemscope or itemtype=''.

How do you specify with Rich Snippets that the page is about a location and there is no human author?

Answer 1

This issue is rather common and found in mostly poorly edited or made WordPress themes. entry-title, updated and author are all related to the Hatom markup which requires hentry to included above the fold and ideally in the body.

It's likely that your website is missing author, updated and entry-title leaving hentry still within your code. View source and check if you can see 'hentry'.

Removing Hentry

If using WordPress removing hentry is rather simple, just login as administrator and edit your functions.php, you can remove Hentry from all blog pages using the below code.

add_filter( 'post_class', 'remove_hentry_function', 20 );
function remove_hentry_function( $classes ) {
    if( ( $key = array_search( 'hentry', $classes ) ) !== false )
        unset( $classes[$key] );
    return $classes;
}

Using Hatom Markup

You shouldn't really need to remove Hatom markup as its compatible along side other markups, schema uses itemprop while Hatom uses classes. If you wish to make use of Hatom microdata then your need a page that looks something like:

<article class="hentry">
  <h1 class="entry-title">Blog Title</h1>
  <p>Published by <span class="author vcard"><span class="fn">Author Name</span></span>
     on <time class="published" datetime="2013-06-13 12:00:00">13<sup>th</sup> June 2013</time>

  <p class="entry-summary">This is just an example</p>

  <div class="entry-content">
    <p>Blah blah blah</p>
  </div>
</article>