How to Fix Hatom Structured Data Error in Blogger

When you use webmaster tools' Search Appearance tab or while using Google rich snippets tool, You frequently see two errors or all of these famous microformat markup errors:

• Warning: Missing required field “entry-title”
• Warning: Missing required field “updated”
• Warning: Missing required hCard “author”

In order to fix the missing entry-title, updated and author errors, we will introduce some schema tags inside your blogger template that will tell search engines how to pick the correct title, Author name and published date of the post.The hatom items with errors that you see in webmasters tool compose of an author and updated fields which we will fix here.

Let's now add some well-defined schema classes that will clean up all errors that you see in your webmaster Structured Data tab.

Fixing hCard error "author"

• Go To Blogger > Template
• Backup your template
• Click "Edit HTML"
• Search for this code

<span class='post-author vcard' >
                <b:if cond='data:top.showAuthor'>
                  <b:if cond='data:post.authorProfileUrl'>
                    <span class='fn'>
                      <a expr:href='data:post.authorProfileUrl' rel='author' title='author profile'>
                        <data:post.author/>
                      </a>
                    </span>
                  <b:else/>
                    <span class='fn'><data:post.author/></span>
                  </b:if>
                </b:if>
              </span>

Replace your code with this one :

<span class='post-author vcard' itemscope='itemscope'  itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
                <b:if cond='data:top.showAuthor'>
                  <b:if cond='data:post.authorProfileUrl'>
                    <span class='fn author'>
                      <a expr:href='data:post.authorProfileUrl' rel='author' title='author profile'>
                        <span itemprop='name'><data:post.author/></span>
                      </a>
                    </span>
                  <b:else/>
                    <span class='fn author'><span itemprop='name'><data:post.author/></span></span>
                  </b:if>
                </b:if>
              </span>

Save your template

Visit the Rich Snippets testing tool, insert your URL and you will find that the hCard error is all gone!

Fixing time updated error

Let's now fix the problem of Missing:updated error. Google must know about the publish date of your content. For that, we will enclose the post timestamp inside a new class of updated.

Inside your template search for this code:

<data:post.timestamp/>

You will found this code two times, both replace with this code :

<abbr class='published' expr:content='data:post.timestampISO8601' expr:title='data:post.timestampISO8601' itemprop='datePublished'>
<abbr class='published' expr:content='data:post.lastUpdatedISO8601' itemprop='dateModified'>
<data:post.timestamp/>
 </abbr></abbr>

Save your template and check with the Rich Snippets testing tool again

Within next 24 hours, Google webmaster tool will update your Structured Data and will show zero items with errors. Since we have cleaned up the schema errors inside your template, therefore within next 24 hours or more Google will start showing a green signal for your structured data!