Hi Vince,
I think we have discussed this before, but following on from the forum discussion here >>

When running any Product Detail page through the "Google Structured Data Testing Tool", we get:
> Valid structured data for "Manufacturer", but
> The Warning "the brand field is recommended. Please provide a value if available."



For some reason, Google simply prefer the itemprop name "brand" rather than "manufacturer".
So the suggestion is to make a small modification to the "incproddetail.php" file. (v7.2.2)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
On LINE 515 and 1221:
Change <span itemprop="manufacturer"> to <span itemprop="brand">
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I have tested this and confirmed the change will resolve all these "Warnings" in the "Google Search Console":



Best regards,

Gary

Hi Gary
I see what you are saying. But when I looked into this a while back I came to the conclusion that the Brand is not the Manufacturer. In the case of mobile phones, the Manufacturer would be "Apple" and the Brand would be "iPhone", so to just rename the Brand to Apple would, I believe, be wrong. It may be that this silences the warnings, but I haven't seen any evidence so far that silencing these warnings makes any difference to page ranking, (although I do think that getting rid of the "noise" from the Google console would be a good thing.) But if Google is going to use this information for any meaningful purpose then I really think it would be better if webmasters try to use the structured data as intended and not just to silence warnings.

Vince

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Yes OK, I see your point Vince.

Gary

Many companies, such as ours Or Apple, have a brand with many sub-brands and using manufacturer might not be appropriate therefore people should have the choice to define as appropriate to their own circumstances... maybe some people want to define manufacture, brand and sub-brand but denying them the choice is always the wrong answer.

John