hAtom errors and Google PageRank

When I checked my blog in Google Webmaster I noticed a lot of errors in the Structured Data section. After fixing the errors in Wordpress by adding structured data, my traffic increased without any changes. That includes posts. So obviously Google uses hAtom when setting PageRank.

Here’s a diagram showing when Google started to remove the errors.
Errors in hatom structured data diagram google webmasters

And here’s a diagram showing the 20% increase in traffic after the errors was fixed.
Diagram showing increased Google traffic

Some of the errors in the diagram remains. That’s because I haven’t fixed static pages yet. But will do tomorrow.

Here’s an article describing how to fix the problem in WordPress. I had to do some other changes because I use the excellent WordPress framework Genesis on my blog, so the setup is a bit different.