Schema that lies about the page

Schema that lies about the page

"Add FAQ schema with great questions to win rich results."

Not if the questions aren't on the page.

The rule everyone skips: structured data must reflect content visible to the user. Mark up an FAQ, a review rating, or a how-to that doesn't appear in the rendered HTML and you're not optimizing — you're filing a spam report against yourself. Google's guidelines call this out explicitly, and manual actions for it are real.

Here's what actually happens: a plugin injects FAQ JSON-LD on every page from a global field, including pages with no FAQ. Now your markup and your content disagree on every URL, which at best gets ignored and at worst gets the whole domain's rich results suppressed.

Fix: schema describes what's on the page, full stop. If the FAQ isn't rendered and visible, the FAQ schema doesn't belong there. Validate against the actual DOM, not the source field. (Markup is a description, not a wish.)