Unmatched schema markup

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Ryan Jones: Why would you do that? Yes it could get one depending on the circumstances.
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  Nimie Gill: I didn`t do it. I noticed on a website. They hired someone to "get them leads" and the phone has not rung. The site itself is designed decent and has the required headings and alt tags. But noticed the schema was way overdone. Their ranking is nonexistent.
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  Brenda Michelin: How`s their content? Backlinks? What are they doing to beef-up their authority? Are their citations in order? Are they in a very competitive space? Local SEO?
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  Michael Martinez: Not a penalty but Google has said they may ignore malformed or empty markup. To earn a manual action, they said you`d have to do something egregious. I don`t recall if was in 2018 or 2017, but I believe there was an announcement from Google explaining how they would handle structured markup abuse. I know they came out against event markup abuse in 2017. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-event-markup-penalty...
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  Michael Martinez: This article is from 2014. I`m not sure if anything has changed since then. Keep in mind that their idea of abuse is usually much worse than what most site owners fear. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-spammy-structured...
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  Nimie Gill: Thank you. That was my understanding also.
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  Richard Hearne: I think they`ve tightened up considerably since then, and review schema on pages without review content is one thing that they do penalize. The penalty is to remove the rich results, but if you are getting any value from rich results I would not break these rules.
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  Stockbridge Truslow: Google doesn`t trust much of anything without verification and validation. I`m convinced this is why Google prefers JSON over Microdata or RDFa.
  
  The latter two types are controlled by marking up what actually appears on the page. You simply build a template and the template marks up what`s there as it pulls the values from the database.
  
  JSON is a whole separate entity on the page and, while you can still make a template to fill out the code - it`s isolated from the page content. This gives Google the ability to get a simple verification process to start things out - when the JSON says, "This is the price" it can then look for that price on the page and confirm that it`s accurate and matches the structured data.
  
  Can we call it a penalty if Google discounts structured data that can`t be verified? I suppose so - though when we talk "penalties" with Google we`re typically describing manual actions or things which might remove you from the results almost entirely. In this case, it`s far more likely that it wouldn`t remove you from the results - you just don`t get all the inherent benefits of having complete and accurate structured data which matches and describes the content visible on the page.