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How To Fix The Invalid Object Type For Brand In Schema

Bhagwad Park

Published on: October 13, 2021

Categories: SEO Tips 7

A few days back, I got this warning message in the Google search console concerning my review of NameHero on my site WP-Tweaks:

Invalid Object Type for Field Brand
Invalid Object Type for Field Brand

This was a structured data error, which was surprising, considering I hadn’t changed any structured data for this particular page – at least nothing which could have led to this error. I’ve been using the same structured data review template for a long time and even wrote a tutorial about the best way to include a review schema on your site.

On digging deeper, I saw that the problem was coming from the following lines:

Thing is Not a Valid Object Type for Brand
Thing is Not a Valid Object Type for Brand

According to this, the “brand” field didn’t allow the “type” attribute to be a “Thing”. I don’t know how or why they changed this, or maybe the Google search console only now decided to include it as a warning. However, I’m pretty sure that it used to be correct because I based my structured data on the code provided by Google themselves. So it’s possible that Google was misinterpreting the standard from the very start.

Whatever the reason, I now had to fix the warning! So I checked out the schema documentation for the “Brand” field on https://schema.org/brand, and saw that there were now only two possible values:

  1. Brand
  2. Organization

I had to decide whether the NameHero I was promoting referred to a brand or an organization. Very often these two are the same thing, but not always since a single organization can have many brands. So for this case, I decided to go with “Brand”.

Fixing the JSON “Review” Structured Data

In my previous posts, I’ve recommended adding JSON structured data to WordPress using the “Custom HTML” block, as this gives you maximum control over the fields. If I was using a plugin, I might not have been able to make the change as easily since the plugin author would have had to update the code, push the release, and I would need to accept the update. But since we’re just using an ordinary block for the JSON code, making the change is trivial.

Just change “Thing” in the above screenshot to “Brand” in the appropriate place as shown here:

Change Object Type from Thing to Brand
Change Object Type from Thing to Brand

In the above example, I’m testing the changes using the Google Rich Results Testing tool, so I can paste the code for my HTML page directly into the editor and it will test the code. This way, I can make changes to my JSON and see if they work before I put them into production.

After changing “Thing” to “Brand”, you can see that the error disappears:

Brand Problem Fixed
Brand Problem Fixed

After making several of these changes to various products on my site, the errors vanish and Google is happy again ?

Schema Plugins vs Custom HTML Code Block

A huge reason why this problem is easy to solve is that I use the custom HTML code block in WordPress to write my review schema. As mentioned above, plugins come with a lot of extra baggage, which makes them inflexible. So while a plugin might have an easy interface to construct the structured data schema, it’s still better to do it manually with blocks of JSON code! This way, making changes just takes a few minutes of testing and you’re done.

I think that the custom HTML code block is one of the best innovations from the WordPress team compared to the old editor, and it has single-handedly changed my opinion of the Gutenberg update. Using it for writing JSON schema code is just one of the many uses.

Bhagwad Park Profile Picture
Bhagwad Park

I’m a NameHero team member, and an expert on WordPress and web hosting. I’ve been in this industry since 2008. I’ve also developed apps on Android and have written extensive tutorials on managing Linux servers. You can contact me on my website WP-Tweaks.com!

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. samaneh says

    November 12, 2021 at 9:58 am

    Hi
    I have this module on my open card version 3.0.2.0
    For schemas, the Object Type value is equal to Thing, but I want to change it to Brand.
    How can I do this ???
    because this issue warning the product schema codes in the search console

    Reply
  2. jeffrey C baribeault says

    December 14, 2021 at 5:01 am

    Hello, when I look at my code in “rich results test” I can’t see how to edit the “type” from “thing” to “brand” since the word “thing” is not in the code. I’m perplexed.

    Reply
  3. Leo Anand Sundararaj says

    January 6, 2022 at 2:59 pm

    I have the same error, I am a non techie. I have yoast seo, which is not allowing me to make any changes, so i added json conent importer plugin and custom html block extension. Can you guide me next steps in editing the code and adding the word “brand”

    Reply
  4. Mobiles Host says

    April 10, 2022 at 11:38 pm

    Thanks man.

    Reply
  5. Connectpos says

    April 27, 2022 at 10:43 pm

    hi, thanks for your article. i followed your guide and fixed it. It must be { and },
    + @type = brand. Last time i use @type = product. so it came to a big issue.

    Reply
  6. Mohammed says

    October 15, 2022 at 10:43 am

    Thanks!
    You helped to fix it.

    Regards

    Reply
    • Bhagwad Park says

      October 17, 2022 at 11:45 am

      I’m glad you found it useful 🙂

      Reply

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