What does Google's Spammy Structured Markup Penalty consist of?

[klaver]

Hey everybody,
I'm confused about the Spammy Structured Markup Penalty:

"This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines."

Does this mean the rich elements are simply removed from the snippets? Or will there be an actual drop in rankings?

Can someone here tell from experience?

Thanks for your help!

[effectdigital]

It can vary. Sometimes it just strips off the rich snippets, other times (if the infringement is quite sever, in Google's eyes) - all pages which have a rich snippet result, can be entirely dropped from the rankings. That's the most severe version of the penalty which I have personally come across

There's a kind of internal disagreement at Google (IMO) in terms of how to implement structured data. Some Googlers vouch for the JSON-LD approach because it's faster and technically more efficient. Whilst this is undoubtedly true, it doesn't 'force' webmasters, devs and practical SEOs to mark up stuff which is 'actually on the page'. This opens the doorway to accidental infringements of this penalty

This is why I always push for the microdata implementation. You can still technically get penalised but it's much harder. Some from Google's anti-spam team, have historically pushed webmasters to adopt microdata over JSON-LD

My preference is, just use microdata. Maybe it is slightly slower and slower to implement, but that forces people to 'think about what they're doing' which is 10x more valuable IMO

[klaver]

Thanks for your answer, Effectdigital!

[effectdigital]

Not a problem!