Suppose, I have 500+ pages on my Q&A website example.com
on WordPress
and I have the Yoast premium plugin
installed and Activated on my WordPress site. I am noticing a drop in the SERP
ranking of my questions post. Earlier the ranking for most of the posts was on 1st page and now it’s no more in the top 100. May be 100+ or unknown to me now.
I was researching it for quite some days and noticed that the Q&A theme Discy
has its own QA schema
on my website itself for each question page which gets created when someone asks any questions on the site user interface. Now, the worst thing here is the Yoast premium plugin installed on my WordPress site is also generating the Webpage Article type schema
as well for each page on my site making each page have two schemas one is Article type and another is QA type
which is causing conflict
and Google finds it hard to prioritize which schema.
Due to this reason, I want to disable the Yoast article schema output
for Q&A website pages and want to keep the original QA page schema
generated by the Discy theme itself.
In Yoast, there is no way to disable the schema on a specific page, however, if you want to disable the
Yoast SEO plugin’s schema output
, you need to add the followingcode snippet
in your theme’s functions.php file:add_filter( 'wpseo_json_ld_output', '__return_false' );
You can also see additional information on this in the
Yoast developer documentation
located here Schema – API documentation.Before adding custom code or filters, You must take a
backup
of your site and database for your site’s health and safety. To back up your WordPress site and database you can useUpdraftPlus -Backup/Restore
plugin. This is especially important because it provides you with a safety net in case something were to go wrong.When you use the
Yoast SEO plugin
with atheme like Discy
that has itsown QA schema
, there can be some conflicts occur in the schema:If both the Yoast SEO plugin and Discy theme are adding article and QA schema data respectively to the same question pages, it could lead to conflict and duplication and make it even worse. Google might find it harder to find which schema data to prioritize whether Article or QA schema which can hurt your page’s ranking on SERP.
You have to disable Yoast schema and retain Discy’s theme schema since the Discy theme has the native QA schema which is specifically designed for Q&A websites, and its schema should be optimal for those purposes.
To disable Yoast schema, You can follow the below steps:
Customization for WP SEO
on the WordPress site. Install and Activate it.Settings
in the left menu panel in WordPress and selectCustomization for WP SEO
.Disable Schema Output
.Check this option
to disable all Yoast SEO’s schema output and clickSave
Changes.Schema Markup Validator tool
.