Two plugins both writing structured data produced conflicting business details and two different star ratings on one page.
What I did
The homepage had three separate Restaurant entries in its structured data, two different star ratings, and one block of code that would not load at all. Two plugins were both writing schema. I switched off the second plugin and kept one source, with one ID for each thing the site describes.
Where
A restaurant website on WordPress, August 2026. A few days later I found the same two-plugin overlap on a second restaurant site.
What changed
One Restaurant entry instead of three, no code errors, and no out-of-date rating. The old rating was a number the plugin had stored, not the real current one.
Did it work
It worked
What you should do
Test your homepage in Google's Rich Results Test and count how many times your business type appears. If it is more than once, find which plugins add it and keep only one.
How long it took
About an hour
An entity is a thing a page describes, such as a business or a person. Structured data tells search engines the facts about that entity: name, address, opening hours, rating.
Why it matters
When one page describes the same business three times with different details, search engines have to guess which version is true. A stored rating that no longer matches the real one also looks untrustworthy.
This usually happens slowly. One plugin is added for SEO, another for schema, and the theme adds some of its own. Each one works on its own. Together they conflict.
How to check your own site
Run your homepage through the Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator.
List every active plugin that has a schema feature, including your SEO plugin and your theme.
Keep one source for each type of schema and switch the feature off in the others.
I count schema sources before I add anything. Installing a plugin to fix schema is often how the duplicate got there in the first place.
End of Lab entry No. 005
Part of The SEO Lab, an open notebook of real SEO work, published as it happens.Recorded 10 October 2026. Filed under Observations. Everything here comes from work I did myself. If a number looks wrong, ask me how it was measured.
