: Incomplete hAtom vs. No hAtom I maintain a WordPress plugin that allows authors to makes widgets representing other pages on their sites with a linked title, thumbnail image, and excerpt of the

@Speyer207

Invalid rich data markup

Having invalid failing rich data markup such as Schema or hAtom isn't going to have a massive impact on your rankings, in fact there's little to none evidence supporting that having good markup actually increases your rankings directly, however it is agreed that having rich data can improve the click rate because of additionally information being provided, especially with review stars for example.

Satisfying hAtom

If you want to validate your current markup then as you know you will need to use author and updated, if you do not want these elements visible then as long as these elements are triggable i.e viewable by both your visitors and search engines then you have nothing to worry about. A typical example can be found below:

HTML:

<article class="hentry">
<header class="entry-title">
<a href="http://example.org" rel="bookmark">Article Title</a>
</header>
<div class="entry-summary">
<p>First Paragraph ideal for a introduction of the article.</p>
</div>
<div class="entry-content">
<p>The rest of the content.</p>
<aside><img src="http://example.org/img.jpg" /></aside>
</div>
<footer>
<p>Published by <span class="author vcard"><span class="fn">John</span></span> on <time class="published" datetime="2013-06-13 12:00:00">13^th June 2013</time> Last Update:<time class="updated" datetime="2014-03-14 12:00:00">Match 2014</time></p>
</footer>
</article>


CSS

Simply using a hover over on the title of your article can easily reveal additional information, ideally however you should give some clue that this information can be viewed for user experience through not required, something like:

article footer{display:none;}
article header a:hover footer{display:block;}


Using Schema

You are correct that with Schema you will not need to include published time, date and updated nor author.

Simply using something like:

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
<a href="http://example.org" itemprop="url">
<span itemprop="name">Article Title</span>
</a>
<div class="content-container">
<p>Content to go here...</p>
<aside><img src="janedoe.jpg" itemprop="image" /></aside>
</div>
</article>

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