What really matters with structured data

I was emailing with a JSON-LD for SEO customer the other day who was trying to get another structured data app to remove bad data their app was adding.

The other app promised to remove all of the errors and warnings as one of their features, which ended up hurting the store.

With structured data your goal shouldn’t be to remove all of the warnings and errors in the data.

Your goal should be to have as much data that makes sense and follows the data guidelines. That’s how you get and keep Rich Results. That’s what you really want for your store.

Google does a really bad job with explaining the differences between those two and they frequently recommend, as a warning, adding data like the critic ‘review’ field which is harmful to 99.9% of Shopify stores. Unless you regularly review other people’s products in your store, you shouldn’t use the critic review field.

You have to go beyond Google’s warnings and dig into the documentation to understand what should and shouldn’t be added.

Sometimes you’ll even need to test something for months to see how it works. That’s why JSON-LD for SEO and manages the structured data for you. It’s code has been and in being tested to make sure it works correctly with Google. With thousands of stores using the app, it’s easy for me to see how Google uses and responds to the structured data.

The problem is that some apps and developers don’t understand the differences between filling in "all the data" and filling in the "correct data". They end up breaking Google’s rules and getting Shopify stores in trouble by losing their Rich Results, getting manual penalties, or even kicked out of the Google results.

That’s why so many stores trust JSON-LD for SEO for their structured data.