Google Recipe Pages – Are They Getting Too Long?

Google hears complaints that recipe pages are too long, and suggests that more concise pages be better for users.

This was stated by Google search advocate John Mueller during the Google Search Central SEO chat at office hours, filmed on March 4th.

During the show, Mueller gets a question from a food blogger asking about the implications for SEO of writing multiple content about the same recipe.

Their idea is to have a recipe-only page and supporting information about that recipe on separate pages.

Mueller is asked if this is a good strategy compared to all the information on one recipe on one page

Separating long pages with recipes into several articles

Mueller believes creating one page that would focus on the recipe and separating the supporting content on the other would be a great structure for users.

This is based on the feedback Mueller hears from people who say there is too much extra content on recipe pages before the actual recipe arrives.

Mueller says it would be okay from Google’s point of view to expand the content to more pages:

“It simply came to our notice then. This is something that makes me get a lot of complaints, especially about the content of recipes, from people who thought they were long recipes, and “I don’t have time to look at a life story and review all these other items about this site – I really want to just a recipe. ‘

So, if you can separate that and focus on the recipe itself, and maybe separate some of the issues with that recipe, from the user’s point of view, that sounds like a great thing. ”

Mueller notes that the challenge of this approach is to balance the power of individual parties.

The more articles published about the same recipe, the more the keyword will be diluted.

One way to amplify the signals of one page before the other is to link only to the supporting content from the main recipe.

Then Google will get a clear signal as to which page is most important.

“I think the balance could be tricky about how strong you make these individual sides. Especially if you kind of break things down on your site, maybe even in terms of internal linking, that suddenly every recipe is two pages, then of course we need to index two pages per recipe.

And we need to give value to two pages on the recipe, which means you can dilute things a bit. On the other hand, if you set it up so that these FAQ pages are only recipe-related, and the primary content on your site is the recipe itself, then I expect we’ll be able to focus on the recipe.

And if someone is looking for something that is in the FAQ section of this recipe, they could show a FAQ page in the search results.

Note on overuse of frequently asked questions

As for tagging frequently asked questions, Mueller notes that Google is aware that some sites are overusing it to take up more space in search results.

Google is now trying to reduce the amount of results enriched with frequently asked questions in the SERP:

“In terms of structured data, in terms of rich results, people sometimes like to put up frequently asked questions on all sides because they add extra space in search results.

I think this is from our point of view almost like on the way out, as we’ve seen people do it, and we try to reduce the amount of entries with frequently asked questions that we show in search results, just because it’s not so useful for users , where each result has this set of frequently asked questions. “

Mueller states this to emphasize that separating content with frequently asked questions from the recipe makes sense to search for:

“It simply came to our notice then. That way, you don’t overburden the recipe result with all of this additional structured data. You really say, “If people want more information, we have that information. If people want to focus only on the recipe, we also have this information. “

Listen to Mueller’s full answer in the video below:

Selected image: RossHelen / Shutterstock