Google’s Lizzi Sassman answered a question in a Google SEO Office hours session about whether it’s okay to combine different structured data types.
The answer illuminated an important point about how Google interprets structured data and whether it’s better to combine structured data or two separate them out.
Combining multiple structured data is called nesting.
What is Nesting?
Structured data is basically about high level data types (called Types) and the attributes of those Types (called Properties).
It’s kind of like with HTML where the main HTML building blocks of a webpage are called Elements and every element has properties that modify them that are called “attributes.”
The HTML of a webpage begins by communicating that it’s an HTML webpage like this:
Similarly, a structured data script begins by saying what the main structured data for the webpage is.
A recipe structured data on a webpage that is about a recipe looks like this: