Should Schema.org Organization data about my company be on every page?

Question

We have added JSON-LD structured data to our website, so Google knows information about our company (company name, url, logo, address, etc.). We worked from the template on Google's documentation.

One thing I couldn't find an answer to is where exactly should this JSON-LD snippet be included on our website? Right now, I only have it on our home page. I didn't know if it would look bad to search engines to have the Organization markup on every single page. But is there any recommendation?

Should Organization markup about our company be included on every page or only on certain pages?

Solution 1

Google looks for such information in traditional places such as About, Contact, Company Info, the sites header, or the sites footer. This began in the early days of semantics where specific information from any website was collected to better help match search intent with entities, locale, and persons.

The home page is a good place for this, but is not fully traditional. It is okay to have this info in your content anywhere you want if (of course), however, I would make sure your company information can be found in as many of these traditional places as makes sense. If there is space for it, and it would not negatively effect user experience, then I would suggest either the header or footer of each page. This ensures that the information is seen by both users and search engines. This is not a requirement, however, making it easy to find your company contact information ensures more opportunities for success in finding it both by users and search engines.

Company information that can be easily found and understood with or without mark-up is an important element for branding. In fact, branding will not happen without it. You will notice that many major brand sites will have contact information in mark-up in a header or footer. This is likely done for a good reason.

Schema.org mark-up is not a necessity for this, however, highly recommended. In the early days, when search engines relied mostly on early parser models and limited in what data elements could be reliably captured; names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and the like, were focused upon specifically to ensure search reliability. This allowed for fairly accurate capturing of the data which fortunately follows traditional formatting and anomalies are predictable. However, using Schema.org ensures that there is no mistake in passing critical data to search engines. For this, there is an additional reward for it's usage in more places such as the knowledge vault. Again, mark-up may not be required for such places. It just makes the data capture more reliable.

Solution 2

A quick point on this. A site I work on recently got a manual action penalty from Google for having organization JSON-LD markup across every single page on their domain. It didn't affect rankings of course but would have impacted all other structured data until resolved. It's one of the minor pitfalls of JSON-LD; that you can put it anywhere and if Google deems it to be too prevalent then it can impede you.

I would only recommend JSON-LD format for structured data in modern SEO, however. Much simpler to implement and Google recommends it too. Just when it comes to http://schema.org/Organization, put it on the homepage.

Comments

[Admin]

Repeat use of Schema.org / Rich Snippets markup i.e LocalBusiness data ··· Are there parts of my site that should not get structured data tags?

[John Washam]

While Google looks for the information in these places, do they need to have this information on every page? Like place it in every header or footer of every page? I just didn't know if Google really needed the structured data on every page, or if they could just get it from the home page.

[closetnoc]

@JohnDubya They do not need it on every page... but if it is something you can comfortably do then it is a good idea. Otherwise, there is no problem on any of the traditional pages. If you look at what the big brands do, you will often see branding markup in the footer. Not all of them of course. But there is a reason why they do it.

[John Washam]

OK, great, thank you. Would you mind including this specific information in your answer, to directly answer my question from above? Thanks so much!

[closetnoc]

@JohnDubya Updated the answer. Thanks for the suggestion! It is best for future users too. Cheers!!

[I Capulet]

Thanks for sharing this. I am working with some dev's right now who won't believe me when I say we shouldn't have org SD on every page!