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I'm currently experiencing the weirdest problem with Google's Rich Snippets Testing Tool. It kept throwing up warnings for my website which didn't make sense, so I pulled all of the structured markup out of my page to do some testing:

The following (based on Google's examples) works perfectly: the 'Google search preview' section displays the result with a snippet. See example here.

So I took the working example, and replaced the dummy details with my own. I was amazed to find that it didn't work! I'm told by the app that it has "Insufficient data to generate the preview". See example here.

So (after lots more testing and banging my head against the wall) I try using the original (working) snippet in example 1, and replace one field at a time. I only got as far as the first 'name' field, and it broke! What's wrong with my name Google? See example here.

I'm really confused by this, what's up? I noticed that if I change my name to "Row Manni" (the same character length as "Bob Smith" in the example), then it does work.

Has anybody experienced anything similar? If so, how did you solve it, and if not, what do I do next?

Thank you

Edit 2011-01-19:

After changing to use vcard (on comment suggestion) I ran a few more tests and I get exactly the same result. These tests are available here (not working - uses my full name) and here (working - using truncated names).

I can't for the life of me work out what's wrong here! If their testing tool isn't working correctly, does their search detect rich snippets in the same way, and is this broken too? I'm leaving the microformats in my page now, but I'd still really like to pursue this for my own interest (and sanity!).

I've cross-posted on the Google webmaster forums (as mentioned in the comments) to see if they pick it up. You can view the thread here.

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  • thought about changing your name ? J/K .. pretty weird.. Most likely it is just an issue with the testing tool and not an issue with your data (frustrating though) Commented Jan 16, 2011 at 12:48
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    It is really frustrating! It does seem more like a bug than a problem with my data, so I cross-posted in the Google Webmaster forum (google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/…). I'll update this question if anything comes up. Commented Jan 16, 2011 at 12:53
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    That is strange. FYI, that's microdata, not microformats. You might try the microformat example here and see if that works any better: google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=146646 Commented Jan 16, 2011 at 16:14
  • I know it's microdata rather than microformats, but many people seem to use 'microformats' as a generic term encompassing both of these (as well as RDFa) which bugs me a lot! I did consider changing to microformats but only as a last resort, I really like the way microdata works and it's meant for this (I don't particularly like the idea of using classes when there are attributes purpose-built). Thanks for the comment, I'll keep you posted. And you were right to remove the tag by the way, in hindsight I was just perpetuating an annoying misconception :) Commented Jan 16, 2011 at 18:39

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It's a "bug":

If name itemprop="name"' (with or without spaces, case-insensitive) matches a substring of the domain, then this error is generated:

Insufficient data to generate the preview.

your domain "dev.rowanmanning.co.uk" contains "Rowan Manning" [minus the space]

try changing your name to: "Rowan Something Manning" and see if it works.

TEST CASES:

fails:

  • domain: rutledge.com
  • name: ru t l e d g e . co
  • test link

fails:

succeeds:

  • domain: jpwco.org
  • name: not_jpwco
  • test link

Names also expected to fail: "co" "uk" "ning" "dev.r owan".

ps. "name" match to the path part of the URL (after the domain) will not yield the error. IE: http://jpwco.com/stack/dev.rowanmanning.co.uk/test3.html succeeds, with the name "Rowan Manning".

Bizarre indeed.

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2 Comments

This looks as close as I'll get to an answer, what an annoying bug! There's not an easy way of checking whether it's also present in search results unfortunately. I'll see if I can grab Google's attention and get this fixed, cheers!
This "bug" appears to have been fixed now. The Rich Snippets Testing Tool seems to properly display information about the author, on all of the provided test pages.

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