Added Schema and Rankings Went Down

[Erin_IAN]

Hello -

We launched a schema plugin for our WordPress site to make our blog seen as articles and main page as an organization. The day after, we saw a dramatic decrease in Keyword rankings but our website health improved with Google. Any thoughts on what could be causing this?

[jessential]

If you use the Schema WordPress plugin, it may be that you have breadcrumbs enabled. Martha van Berkel, a founder, helped me troubleshoot a similar issue and we resolve them by turning off breadcrumbs. It seems that some JS can cause odd behavior.

I believe it works better to add schema via the GTM.

SEMrush is tops at establishing your website's health, but cannot diagnose some of these happenings (no one service can).

Your site relies on quite a few plugins - I wish you the best. I do audits; let me know how I can help you.

[CleverPhD]

You may need to login to Google Search Console and check and see if you have a manual action of some sort.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-rich-snippet-manual-actions-increase-21600.html

I did some digging, there are some cases where WP plugins have added so much markup it is overdone and that can cause issues.  I did not see the one you are using (Schema plugin v1.6.1) mentioned, but that does not mean it caused the issue.

Additional info

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-rich-snippets-homepage-19205.html

http://www.thesempost.com/wordpress-recipe-plugins-causing-rich-snippet-manual-actions/

[CleverPhD]

Hello!

When you state "website health" improved, what do you mean?

• Did you check your schema with the Google Rich Snippets tester and it validated? https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool
• Did you go into Google Search Console and check for errors and validate that Google is finding the snippets? https://www.google.com/webmasters/#?modal_active=none

My suspicion is that the schema plugin is maybe doing other things you did not intend it to do. Did it add a noindex tag? Did it setup strange canonicals?

Without you specifically giving a page to look at, screen shots from any of the above (or other tools) or what is the specific plugin you are using, it is otherwise very difficult to figure out.

Cheers