I’ve been going through all the errors I get from my shop in Google Search Console and one of the critical issues regards Missing field ‘author’ and Missing field ‘ratingValue’ may be related to these “erratic codes” identified by the tech support guy from Vitals. They say these don’t make any sense, and should be deleted, or we should contact the guy who wrote this.
Unfortunately we lost contact with the programmer and I try to fix it by myself. So I can just open the product.template.liquid file and delete these lines and it is done?
Hope to get some positive response, thank you very much in advance!
Yes you can delete that code. This code isn’t pulling real reviews into the structured data so it has no positive impact on your SEO.
It looks like they hard-coded a review in microdata so that a non-critical issue would go away in Search Console however it’s a fake review that doesn’t exist (which violates Google’s guidelines and can cause a manual action against your store) and is incomplete. So they tried to solve a non-issue by putting your overall SEO at risk. This likely now causing a critical error in Search Console, hence the recommendation from Vitals to remove it.
Always create a backup of your theme before editing the code.
Once you’ve deleted the code, check your live site to make sure you didn’t delete anything by accident.
I appreciate your thorough explanations, I wanted to know what it was exactly doing and why it was placed, so your answer really helped me to understand that. will try to do this a bit later, hope I will not screw this up! thank you!
