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Guide · Any system, checked in the page source

Where the schema goes, and how to find duplicates

Building a schema is half the work. The other half is putting it in the right place and making sure it stands there alone. Run an SEO plugin and paste your own JSON-LD as well, and you have two contradicting descriptions of the same business on the same page, with the search engine deciding which one counts.

Why this matters is explained in Structured data (schema) explained: how Google and AI understand your business.

How to do it

  1. Sort out what you actually have first. Anything describing the business, so LocalBusiness or Organization with name, address, phone and opening hours, belongs once across the whole site. Anything belonging to a single page, so Article, FAQPage or a service, belongs on that page.This sorting decides everything that follows. Copying the business schema onto every subpage is the most common mistake and creates exactly the duplicates dealt with below.
  2. Open your published home page and put view-source: in front of the address, so view-source:https://your-domain.com. The browser then shows the delivered source instead of the rendered page.
  3. Search the source for application/ld+json. Every hit is one block of structured data. Count them.
  4. Look at each block and ask: does this one describe my business? If more than one does, you have found the problem. One block may hold several types, that is fine; two blocks both describing your company are not.A plugin like Yoast or RankMath adds its own business schema without asking. Anyone pasting their own JSON-LD alongside it only finds out here.
  5. Check that each block is valid JSON at all. Paste it into validator.schema.org under the Code snippet tab. A block with a missing comma or a broken quote is passed over by search engines without comment, and the page itself shows nothing of it.On one of the two sites this guide was read off, that was exactly the case: three blocks, one of them unreadable.
  6. Pick one route. Either the plugin manages the business data, in which case fill it in there completely and leave your own JSON-LD out. Or you set everything yourself, in which case switch the plugin's schema off. Running both side by side is the state you just found.

How you can tell it worked

Open the source again with view-source: and search for application/ld+json once more. Exactly one block may now describe your business. Page-level blocks such as FAQPage or Article may sit beside it, since they describe something else.

A duplicate is rarely fatal, search engines usually pick one of the two. Just not always the one you wanted, and with contradicting addresses or opening hours it turns into a real error. A clean schema also creates no ranking, it makes your details unambiguous.