My good friend Brett (who also is a super nice customer of mine) asked what the “Unnamed item” on Googles Rich Results Test Tool means. The reason for the question was a warning from a SEMRush tool that told him the following: “A value for the itemListElement field is required“.

First things first: There is no clear statement from Google why they show “Unnamed item” here. I also did not find anything related to that on the official Structured Data Reference from Google.

So my belief is that it means nothing. Why? Because the name shows up when you add the “name” property. Here is an example:

{
  "itemListElement": {
    "name": "Help – About Us",
    "position": "1",
    "item": "https://posterprintshop.com/about/",
    "@context": "http://schema.org",
    "@type": "ListItem"
  },
  "@id": "#breadcrumbs",
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
  "name": "Test"
}

The last line very important. I’ve added the value “Test” here. As soon as you do it, it shows up on Googles Test Tool.

However it doesn’t make any sense. At least for the BreadcrumbList schema. Of course the schema can have a name attached to it, and you can add it using SNIP (my Structured Data and Schema WordPress Plugin) but how would you name it? “Breadcrumbs”? You see…. it doesn’t make sense. So best is to remove the name because the official reference for breadcrumbs has no “name” attribute there, too.

However, you should add the name property to all of the “ListItem” sub-schemas that are added to BreadcrumbList schema. Otherwise they will not show up on search results. But for this you’ll get an error anyway.