Sometimes you take over a website which already has structured data on it. If there’s hundreds of pages, the prospect of rewriting all that into a different format like JSON-LD can be very daunting.
Luckily, Google announced in October 2023 that it will start supporting different types of schema on the same page.
What if there is more than one type of structured data on the page?
Some websites will have two different types of structured data on the same page. Whilst this isn’t recommended, Google has confirmed that it started supporting this via Syntax Graph Merge, so you might see both JSON-LD and also Microdata on the same site.
In order for this to work, you need to merge the structured data types together using @id in the JSON-LD:
"@id": "https://example.com/articles/some-article#mainEntityOfPage"and also in the Microdata:
itemid="https://example.com/articles/some-article#mainEntityOfPage"This can cause conflicts if both types have the same properties, or have conflicting properties for the same types, for example:
In the microdata it says that the name is “My fabulous event”:
<article itemid="https://example.com/articles/some-article#mainEntityOfPage" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Event">
<span itemprop="name">My fabulous event</span> - REQUIRES
In the JSON-LD it says that the name of the event is “My great event”:
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@id": "https://example.com/articles/some-article",
"@type": "Event",
"name": "My great event",
"description": "The <meta> description goes here.",
"url": "https://example.com/articles/some-article"
}Search engines will be confused as to what the name of the event actually is, as you are giving them conflicting information. The idea of the merge is that they are supposed to compliment each other, and not conflict. So in this case, I would recommend removing the “name” from the JSON-LD. Basically, the properties should be in either one or the other (not both) which are then linked together using the @id.
