Google heard complaints about recipe pages being too long, and suggested a more concise page might be better for users.
Google’s search advocate John Mueller said this in a Google Search Center SEO office hour hangout recorded on March 4.
During the show, Mueller received a question from a food blogger about the SEO impact of writing multiple pieces of content for the same recipe.
The idea was to create a page with just the recipe, with supporting information about that recipe on a separate page.
They asked Mueller if it was a good strategy compared to putting all the information for a recipe on one page
Split long recipe pages into multiple articles
Mueller believes that creating one page to focus on recipes and separating supporting content to other pages would be a good structure for users.
This is based on feedback Mueller has heard from people saying there is too much extra content on the recipe page before going into the actual recipe.
From Google’s perspective, it would be nice to spread the content across multiple pages, Mueller said:
“From Google’s point of view, it’s absolutely fine. Especially with the recipe content, I get a lot of complaints from people who think the recipes are long and ‘I don’t have time for life stories and I don’t have time to go through all the other Project page – I really just want the recipe.
So if you can isolate that and focus on the recipe itself, and maybe isolate some of the issues surrounding that recipe, from a user perspective, that sounds great. “
The challenge with this approach, Mueller notes, is balancing the strengths of individual pages.
The more articles are published about the same recipe, the lighter the keywords will become.
One way to reinforce the one-page signal is to only link to supporting content in the master recipe.
Then Google gets a clear signal about which page is the most important.
“I think the balance can be tricky when it comes to the intensity of production of these individual pages. In particular, if you do a split on your site, possibly also involving internal linking, and suddenly each recipe ends up being two pages, then we Of course two pages must be indexed for each recipe.
And we have to give each recipe a two-page value, which means you might dilute things a bit. On the other hand, if you set it up so that these FAQ pages might only link from recipes, and the main content on your site is the recipes themselves, then I’d like us to focus on the recipes.
If someone searches the FAQ section for that recipe, we’ll be able to show the FAQ page in the search results. “
A note on overuse of FAQ tags
Regarding the FAQ tag, Mueller noted that Google knows some sites overuse it to take up more space in search results.
Now, Google is trying to reduce the number of FAQ-rich results shown in the SERPs:
“From a structured data perspective, from a rich results perspective, people sometimes like to add FAQ markup on all pages because it adds extra space in the search results.
From our point of view, I think it’s almost like quitting because we’ve seen people do it and we’re really trying to reduce the number of FAQ entries that we show up in search results, just because that’s not the case for It is useful for users who have this set of FAQs for each result. “
Mueller brings this up to illustrate that separating FAQ content from recipes makes sense for search:
“So from my point of view, it made sense to move it to a separate page. Because you’re not going to overburden the recipe results with all this extra structured data. You really like ‘if people want more We have the information. If people just want to focus on the recipe, we have the information.”
Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below:
Featured image: Ross Helen/Shutterstock
