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I am unable to find official wording and I'm hoping that some Rich Snippets/Schema Guru can give me some insight into proper usage of repeated content when it comes to using markup.

I'm building a site that wants to use Schema.org as the markup type and the owner would like as much usage as possible. The business name, telephone and address will appear on every page now is it valid or even useful to use Rich Snippets on every page where this information is displayed.

For example this information appears in the header, and footer of every page of the site and too give you an example of my current markup see below:

<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">
<header>
    <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.domain.co.uk/">
        <img itemprop="logo" src="image.png" alt="Company Name Logo" />
    </a>
    <span itemprop="telephone">01202 000 000</span>
</header>
<div> This is where the content will go</div>
<footer>
  <span itemprop="name">Company Name</span>
  <span itemprop="description"> A small little bit about this company</span>
  <div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
    <span itemprop="streetAddress">Address Goes here</span>
    <span itemprop="addressLocality">Area Here</span>,
    <span itemprop="addressRegion">Region Here</span>
  </div>
 </footer>
</body> !-- Local Business Schema Now Closed -->

So as you can see above this information will be displayed on every single page. Is this valid or bad to repeat usage of this information in Schema.org format?

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  • Some semantic markup such as authorship is designed to be duplicated across multiple pages. I'm not sure what the point of local business markup is though, does it change the way the site is displayed in the SERPs at all? Commented Oct 22, 2013 at 21:30
  • 1
    Nope, but 90% of schema doesn't effect SERPS in any sharp or form and using that logic it would mean that schema is pretty useless - none the less they want it used as much as possible, I don't care as long its not bad practice or negative seo. Commented Oct 23, 2013 at 19:04

2 Answers 2

6

Microdata doesn’t have a concept of "site"; each page is separate. So you should include all relevant metadata on every page where the corresponding content is visible (but only one time per page).

  • Think of a browser-add on that displays all Microdata name-value pairs in a sidebar: why should the user have to visit a specific page of your site to see the metadata in the sidebar?

  • Think of copy-and-paste or drag-and-drop: why should the metadata only be included in the clipboard when copying/dragging content from one specific page of the site?

  • Think of an agent that offers to add the local business address to the address book: why should the user have to visit one specific page of your site to let your address be added automatically?

2
  • it's said that "best practice is to keep focused and generally use a single top-level Type on a given page". Passing LocalBusiness, Organization, etc as top-level types (via a top-level array] seems to contradict this idea. Should we aim to nest LocalBusiness inside more specific types, e.g. Article or Product? Or, just pass several top-level types as an array? Commented Dec 24, 2018 at 0:58
  • 1
    @RonRoyston: It’s the best practice to use properties to connect items, which typically results in having only one top-level item: WebPage -- and the Organization is the publisher, the Article/Product is the mainEntity etc.
    – unor
    Commented Dec 24, 2018 at 20:56
1

I think that markup on every page is fine, but I would have all instances use a common url (a page about the business) and a common id (itemid in microdata). This will be a signal to indicate that they all relate to a single entity.

The referenced URL should be a page about the business which includes a far more detailed version of the markup. Again, using the same id so systems can connect the dots.

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