The Obligatory Blog

Recipe Rich Snippets

Yesterday I was told about a new rich format snippet from Google specifically for marking up recipes. Which seemed an ideal little project to roll out onto Bilby Bites which, being a food blog, has a lot of recipes.

The idea behind all of Google's rich format snippets is to identify to Google's page crawlers specific pieces of information. You wrap a certain tag name around the title, another around any images, another around the ingredients and so on. When you're reading a recipe online you can easily spot for yourself if the introduction is written before the ingredients, or the cooking time is after the number of people it serves. But for a computer to interpret all of this, it needs some extra information.

So Google have provided a set of specific tags to mark up recipes that they can then display in a dedicated format within their search results.

I set it up on Bilby Bites using the Microformats option and found it to be a really easy process using the online samples. My one problem I discovered at the end, as a result of me diving in and not reading Google's documentation right through:

Who is eligible for Rich Snippets?
Currently, review sites and social networking/people profile sites are eligible. We plan to expand Rich Snippets to other types of content in the future.

Well that's a problem - Bilby Bites doesn't fall under any of these categories. However, the formatting is on the site and even if it isn't getting recipes displayed in Google's search results, I can't help feeling it won't do any harm to the pages SEO, and hopefully Google will roll out acceptance to other sites in the future at which point it's there ready to go.

Another blog post from John Cowen - a web designer in Exeter working under the name Mekonta. If you liked this article, subscribe.