Is my structured data using the right type?
Structured data starts with a type: what the thing on the page actually is. A page that only declares "this is a website" or "this is a web page" has markup, but it says nothing a machine did not already know. A page that says "this is a product", "an article" or "a local business" tells it what to look for next.
What it actually is
The shared vocabulary for structured data, schema.org, is a family tree of hundreds of types — Organization, Product, Article, Event, Recipe, LocalBusiness and many more — each with its own properties. Some types only describe the scaffolding of a site: the website, the page, the trail of links above it. They are useful, but on their own they are a frame with nothing in it.
Why it matters
The type is what makes the rest of the markup mean something. Once a page declares a Product, a machine knows to expect a price, an availability and reviews, and it can repeat those facts with confidence. Once a page declares an Article, it knows to look for an author and a date. Markup that stops at the scaffolding leaves an assistant to infer all of that from the visible text, which is the guesswork structured data exists to remove.
What good looks like
Each page names at least one type that matches what the page really is, chosen as specifically as is honest — a dentist as a Dentist rather than a generic Organization, a recipe as a Recipe — with the properties that type expects filled from the facts on the page.
Being honest about it
We only judge this on pages that carry structured data at all; a page with none is a matter for the presence check, not this one. And the type has to be true. A page marked up as something it is not, to chase a feature in some listing, is worse than a page with only the scaffolding, because now the markup contradicts the page.
Where most sites go wrong
The common pattern is a plugin or theme that adds the site-level scaffolding to every page and nothing else, so every page passes a "has structured data" glance while describing nothing. The other is the right type with the wrong facts: a template that marks every page as an Article, including the contact page and the price list.
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