A new customer contacted me today and had a really good question. So I thought I can write a blogpost about it. The question was if it’s okay to have multiple snippets of the same type on one page. Here is the answer:

In general I would say “yes, that’s okay” but – as always – it depends on what you want to do. Let’s have a look at some examples.

Example 1: one blogpost, one recipe

Imagine you have a blogpost with a recipe. In this case I would recommend to generate a recipe-snippet for the single recipe. That’s it.

Example 2: one blogpost, multiple recipes

Of course that’s also possible. In this case, make multiple recipe snippets for each recipe. It’s then up to the search engines which of the snippets they show on search results.

If that page is a category page you can use the carousel feature with SNIPs loop functionality so that Google and other search engines show a list of recipe for your search.

Example 3: one blogpost, multiple recipes, one main recipe

Let’s say you created a blogpost about a single recipe but on the frontend you show related recipes as well. In this case I would recommend to generate recipe snippets for all recipes but for the main snippet I would add the mainEntityOfPage property. Just to make sure search engines recognize the main thing.

Read more about how you can create more complex schemas.

Example 4: Multiple rich snippet plugins

Let’s say you have a blogpost with one single recipe but you’re using multiple, different Rich Snippets plugins.

I would not recommend to create multiple snippets for the same recipe. You maybe say “Better safe than sorry” but that’s not true in this case. I guess that it confuses search engines and – of course – it requires you to manage two snippets for the same thing.

One solution would be to do the same thing as described in example 3 (add the mainEntityOfPage property to one of the snippets). However the end result would be that search engines may see the two snippets a different ones.