Ilana's JSON‑LD for SEO (TM)

BEWARE! Updating our review.

We have used this app for over two years but will delete it soon. Recently, we found that it embeds your personal contact information (name, address and phone number) on every single page in the HTML. If you do a search on Bing, this information is now included as part of the search results! Whatever contact information you put in the Shopify General Settings, it will display it without your knowledge and consent even if that information is meant for Shopify use only.

Also, if you create any pages, it also embeds the site owner name as the author name, and this gets displayed in the search result on Bing. We’re taking about FAQ, About Us, etc...which is completely ridiculous. You do not need to know who authors pages, it's not the same as blog posts! Shopify does not give you the option to the define this when you create a page, so why does this app decide to embed this as part of the meta data? It’s ridiculous and invasive.

We asked the developer of this app to remove this information from the app, but he has refused. Instead he is asking us to update to the contact information! We sell downloadable digital products and only provide email support! We do not want the phone number and address to be made public! We reported this issue to Shopify, and was told this app should have never exposed our personal information, and it is considered a privacy violation.

Do not use this app unless you don’t care to have your personal information / contact information meant for Shopify use only to exposed to the public.

Response to developer:

We provide support by email only, so why would we want the phone number to be exposed? We told you this already. The problem is that you're injecting information that the merchant does not want, and there is no way for them to opt-out. You provide no settings in your app to do this. You should be absolutely clear in your app description what data fields you are injecting and let us decide if we want to download your app or not. The contact information in the General Settings is NOT public information. The merchant does not have to share this information publicly, and you should not make the assumption to display it without our consent.

When I started my Shopify store, I did not have too much experience relating to the SEO, Rich Snippets and this kind of things, that is why I thought that it could be one of the best option for my store and I paid the $299, after that I had some questions relating to the app, SEO and things like that. When I tried to ask my questions I have always got very rude responses, I felt very ashamed. Anyway, I thought that maybe he offers one of the best app in the Shopify app store, that is why he is charging that amount of money and behave me in a very rude way.(maybe due to that reasons it could be acceptable). It has been more than 3 months and for now, I have more experience about the SEO, Rich Snippets, way of the Support that average app owners provide and so on. For now, my store got rich snippets in the google search, but it has almost zero effect to my sales and as I get more experience I encountered with many apps that offer same service for a very, very low price and as I read the reviews of them I can see that their customers also happy with that apps. I cannot say that he did not provide what he claimed, but the thing is you can find same service for almost 10 times cheaper price. Just google it and even you can search in the Shopify app store, you will definitely find better and cheaper apps. As I mentioned above, when I purchase that app, I did not have experience, if I saw the review something like that I would purchase cheaper version of the exactly same service and most importantly, I could get better customer service. The most important lesson for me in the Shopify business was do not spend too much money for the things that you could get very, very cheaper version. You could ask that why there is a too many positive reviews here, as I mentioned above, they provide whatever they claim but most probably many of the positive review owners still have not made a research for the cheaper version or just close their store after few months later. Hope this review could help others, because I think that in that business everyone should help each other. Good luck to everyone

NB: From Jun 9 till Sep 10 (3months) Still no results in Fact too much warnings and errors, site links search box still going down everyday in Google search console, i had to hire someone to remove this app and install everything again properly.
***DONT WASTE YOUR MONEY AND TIME WITH THIS APP***
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The worst app ever i didnt see any improvement.
I didnt see any rich results...
we paid for nothing... and when i ask eric for refund he said he dont do it.
i install it for 3 months now nothing shows....
always giving me reasons for not working.... the people who write they see results in 3 days lLOOOLLL that is so funny
dont purchase it and make our mistakes.
NB: 1-the other app your saying that i install it was before yours dear.
Again you didnt say anything until i asked you after 1 month when i will see results?? and you suggest to remove the first one.

Installed for about 1 month. Nothing work for my shop. Then my shop was taken off by Shopify for some reason. I can not move this app to my new shop. Wasted $299. Will not install this app again. I have used another SEO app for 3 shops. An app named "SEO, Schema, JSON‑LD" works great. The search results display has been optimized a lot and updated quickly. This is the first time to try this app. I thought it might be performed better as it is more expensive. Unfortunately, it's not worth.

Usually I do not leave reviews unless I can say something good, but felt that we needed to make others aware to warn them, so they can save themselves the trouble/disappointment and skip this app and work with another app/company.

Essentially, it has gotten to the point where it seems like this app developer does not care about his clients anymore and provide misleading and false advertisement; since, he may believe he has gotten enough good reviews in the past, so he doesn’t need to bother anymore. In that, we signed up with this app developer about a year ago and at the time he offered two license plans: JSON-LD Basic tier option [$69] and JSON-LD for SEO Plus+ option [$299]. However, although money was tight, we chose to invest more upfront with this app developer by opting to pay for the $299 Premium Plus plan and install the app [he just recently stopped offering the $69 basic plan in 02-04-19].

Please note, he advertises this app as a one-time fee setup for each Shopify business store. During this time we rebranded and trademarked our brand and as a result updated our store URL to be consistent with our new trademarked brand. Since it’s the same business we also setup a permanent redirect of the old-shop-URL to the new-shop-URL. At the time we also had about 3 other one-time charge apps, including the JSON‑LD for SEO, making it 4 one-time charge apps in total; along with several other paid monthly apps.

Subsequently, we contacted all 4 app developers including JSON‑LD for SEO that provided the app at a one-time charge, to let them know we changed our brand but we are the same business and all products are same just update to our shop URL. All the app developers had no problem checking/verifying this, then told us to go ahead and install the app again and then they moved over/restored our account settings to the new shop URL without charging us again; since it’s the same business with one Shopify account.

However, its only Eric D the developer for this app, that refused to help us restore our previous paid account license and went as far as insulting us by telling us we can sign up for the $69.00 Basic license instead of the$299 Premium+ license because after 02-04-19, he would only be offering the $299 plan [as if we were unable to afford the $299 plan though we already paid him $299].

However, when I countered that if we wanted to buy his basic plan for $69, I would not have given him $300 for the premium plus+ plan before, for our Shopify store. He basically responded and stated in summary that, ‘since you are using a new myshopify url, it does not matter if it’s the same business and store, the only thing that matter is that only that you have a new Shopify account that has not paid for the app yet’.

So, we were really shocked and felt cheated by this response, because for him to communicate this after advertising that’s it’s a onetime fee license for one shop, it became very concerning the way he dealt with me and his cold inflexibility. For although we are a startup, we did not hesitate before to pay him for the JSON-LD for SEO Plus+ at $299 and now we are not able to benefit from the app, since you would have had to wait a longer term to see the results. But because of this very bad support service we will never know...as we no longer have the app setup for our store because of this unfair app developer.

However, I did not want to waste any more time trying to reason with him on this, because it was pretty clear cut, that he had a choice to do the right thing and help us restore our previously paid licensed account like the other app developers, since it’s the same shop and business and he chose not to do the right thing. So, I just decided to cut our losses with him while we are ahead and alert others about this dishonest/misleading practice.

Also, please note, once I told this app developer I was going to share my experience, he did not respond. But all of a sudden, the regular business tips newsletter he was sending me before when I paid for the $299 plan, stopped abruptly, so it looks like we got unsubscribed from his newsletter. Which actually works out best for us, because when you first signup up for his plan, he starts spamming you with several canned emails in an exaggerated effort to show he cares about your business when the reality is, he doesn’t. So, we would rather not get any emails from him, because what he is telling you, you can easily get this information from Shopify blogs and online resources when you need it. So, I am glad he has decided to stop spamming us, because 99% of his canned emails we don’t read anyway.

Since then, we’ve researched and signed up for the free SEO JSON-LD Boost by Verge that does the same thing his app does for $299, so we wish we had found that before we lost $299 with him.

Plus, to complete our SEO circle we also use the Smart SEO app that does even more and that team is very professional/easy to work with. The cool thing is that Smart SEO works awesome with the free SEO JSON-LD Boost by Verge that replaces this app, so there is no app conflict.
Plus, to ensure we get the best results, we are doing ongoing organic SEO optimization for our shop as well for the long term game and PPC for short term, that helps balances out our store traffic very well.

Hope this helps.

New update from support: "You are welcome to continue the use of my app, however I will no longer be responding to your emails. If that does not suit you, you are welcome to uninstall and remove the code." You shall think twice before you pay $299

Replay to UpDate 4 December, 2019:
I still have Schema issue, for some Theme you need customise it, if anybody will have the same issue watch this video, since you will have zero support from support https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uZSBWuwkrM.

Also I used different app on my other web site to install JSON, the same issue they fixed in 48 hours. I don't know why, but Sitelinks searchbox with different up App I have already 38 valid pages with this app only 1.

Thank you for your replay. However I sent you scenn short, which indicate your app create warning. I check few website of my competitors, which in sero point inn Google, they don't have any warning, meaning till I will be clean, nothing will change my possition in Google rancking. It may be good app, which shall improve your SEO, but at the same time you shall expect few erros and warning, which you may have after installation. When you buy app, not thing said about conflicting app. I paid $299 for app and $500 to third party to clean old codes. It was not bad, at least I did a lot of cleaning and improvments. However I still have one waring, which according to Google testing tool come from JSON-LD for SEO. App developer give very interesting replay "not apply to your type of business".
Just let you know, you may ask if app apply to your type (shopity store) business before install and buy it.

Not Happy! I paid $299 for this app which is a lot of money, and after my website was compromised I decided to rebuild my site using the same domain name, just a different shopify domain. It was the only way I could rebuild my site without any down time. I went above and beyond to protect my customers, however I can't say the same for this developer. JSON-LD-SEO refused to transfer my membership or offer me anything in return for what is meant to be a life time membership. I have read other reviews who claim this developer has excellent support which I find hard to be believe. Now that I have paid $299 Ive got nothing to show for it. Ilana said it was in their policy to not allow such a thing, however, she said she would transfer the app if shopify would confirm in writing that they asked me to change over the store. In other words, she doesn't care about what I have to say (the paying customer) or what it has cost me, or where I am coming from. It's not like I am trying to scam you Ilana... its the same domain, the same store. I am the one who's been scammed. Very unethical!