What caused the problem?
This has to do with the schema language and Google's need to see the "https://" in a particular place on the page. The problem was that my HTTP / HTTPS Remover Wordpress plugin was removing all those parts of the URL so all the links in the code were visible as "//whatever" without that starting part.This was not a problem at all for my visitors or anyone. It was just a technical issue / problem that Google wanted done another way.
How did I fix it?
- I was forced to deactivate and delete the HTTP / HTTPS Remover Wordpress plugin in order to make the "https://" part visible in the URL. After that I had to query my database to find any old leftovers of "http://" which was the first reason I had installed this plugin in the first place.
- Now that I don't have the plugin I have to do the manual work of changing all the old "http://" into "https://" so that the website can remain secure.
- In my case I did this first by manually looking where those old leftovers exist. I found them both in WP-options as well as WP-posts and finally I used the Better Search Replace Wordpress plugin to do the replacement. I was doing this very slowly and carefully and I backed up my database before doing so because it is not possible to undo this action and doing something wrong can break the website.
What else did I do?
- After replacing all into "https://" I cleared cache and went to do random page checks on my website to make sure everything is working. Random checks are not a guarantee but it's still good to do.
- I then looked into my site code to double-check that in the place where Google had an issue with the full URL is now showing instead of just "//whatever". It naturally was as the HTTP / HTTPS Remover Wordpress plugin was now removed.
- I then went back to the Google Search Console and clicked the button to Validate my fix. Google did a check for a few minutes to make sure the fix was done and accepted my request. The Validation then takes a number of days to complete. Currently it is saying "Validation Looking good" and I am confident that this issue is now resolved.
UPDATE
Hi again. It's been a few days (~ 5 days since validation started) and I just wanted to add an update.Now 68 out of the 155 URLs have passed the validation but Google has put them under the "Other" category rather than "Passed". This is because Google could not find the original error since I have fixed it so in those cases it puts in the "Other" category. But you see on the picture I added below that this is considered same as "Passed".
Again, I don't know why it takes so long for the validation to finish, I would think Google could do this in minutes, but as you can see it has been 5 days and it only processed 68 URLs.
Anyhow, I am not worried because clearly the fix has worked and the URLs are passing validation so I am sure the issue of "Unparsable structured data" / "Incorrect value type "@context" " has been fully fixed.
