Let's play: spot the structured data bug that'll hurt your Rich Results. Round 1.

I’ve seen this structured data bug come up a few times now. It’s always in the theme’s data.

Can you spot it? You have 30 seconds, GO…

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No peeking at the answer below until you’ve locked-in your choice

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And the winner is: this isn’t a free product, it should have a price of 19.

With the price 0 in the data, that’s telling search engines that the product is free.

Two things might happen:

1. Google might compare the $0 price in the structured data against the landing page and see that your structured data is wrong.

Result: you don’t get Rich Results and you might risk a spammy structured data manual action filed against your domain which puts all of your Rich Results and rankings at risk.

2. Or Google might not analyze the page well enough and give you a Rich Result that says the product is Free.

Result: you get a spike of customers clicking through, only to be disappointed that the price is $19, and they complain about your bait-and-switch tactic and never come back to your store.

Meanwhile you don’t have any idea there’s a problem at all.

I’m still trying to figure out if there are certain themes that have this bug in their code by default or if it’s a result of a theme customization or a broken app. I’ve seen it from some broken apps (including review apps for some reason) but it’s inconsistent.

Whatever the cause, this kind of structured data bug is going to hurt if you don’t have a better provider of structured data like JSON-LD for SEO.