Schema markup: what actually moves the needle vs what's cargo-culted

Schema markup, the structured data that helps search engines understand a page's content, gets treated two ways by most sites: entirely ignored, or applied indiscriminately, every schema type a plugin offers, added everywhere, on the theory that more structured data can only help. Neither approach reflects what schema actually does or where its value really sits.

The types that reliably produce visible value are a fairly short list: Product schema for e-commerce, enabling rich results with price and availability, Review and Rating schema where genuine reviews exist, FAQ schema for content that genuinely answers distinct questions, and Article schema with accurate publish and update dates. These directly influence what shows up in search results, not just how a crawler parses the page.

The types added indiscriminately by plugins and templates rarely produce a measurable result, because they either don't correspond to any rich-result feature Google actually surfaces, or they're applied to content that doesn't genuinely match the schema type's definition, which risks a manual action for structured data spam rather than any upside.

The useful question isn't "do we have schema," it's "does this specific schema type correspond to a rich result we actually want and content that genuinely qualifies for it." Applied that way, schema is a handful of deliberate additions, not a checklist to maximize, and it consistently outperforms the cargo-culted everything-at-once approach.