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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Google's Recipe Rich Snippets Markup

It looks like I finally managed to convince Google to use recipes info provided in rich snippets info of my cooking site in the search results.

It would be a sarcasm to say it doesn't feel like almost 2 years passed since Google announced recipe snippet format.

And now, after testing over and over, trying couple of different formats, making sure page with markup loads as fast as I can get it to, talking to the silent wall of rich snippet testing tool which gives you everything but useful info about why the formatting of your snippet may be not the correct one and how can you fix it... I finally got it right or at least to the certain extend: review numbers are not showing up in the results, but at least cooking times are and, most importantly, images.

So here are the things which worked for me, maybe some of them will safe some time for you:

  • Scheme.org recipe rich snippet format - easiest and cleanest to implement
  • Hacked wordpress to not use any other microformat: comments template has hcard in markup and post has hentry one that makes them to take over recipe formatting and only comments were showing up in testing tool
  • Removed rel attributes from tag-links, category-links and links in blog roll
  • Made sure that all marked up info is also visible to human visitor, so no <meta itemprop...> unless it is followed with text which explains it
Funny enough that the last issue was pointed to me by Google itself in email with "Rich Snippets Implementation" subject which I received after my second to last attempt to submit my site to rich snippets submission form. I didn't receive any reply from that form submission before, so it felt like I was almost there, just had to fix that small issue with visible content.

Would it be so hard to add this kind of check/error/message to the rich snippet testing tool results, nobody knows...

4 comments:

  1. And it didn't last long... all EYC rich snippets are gone from the search results, and I have absolutely no idea as to why....

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    1. And it is back again, apparently when I upgraded Wordpress it wiped out my changes with which I removed other type of markup for vcard in comments and google couldn't swallow both formats used on the same pages - one for recipes and one for comments.

      Took me some time to figure out and fix it...

      Yay to Structured Data reports in Webmaster tools :)

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  2. Julia - I just got back from a wonderful trip to Ukraine with my daughter and a few friends (specifically,the City of Alushta on the Crimean Coast .. beautiful setting and beautiful people.) While we were there we had kompot at a traditional Ukrainian meal, and loved it, so one of our new friends gave me a bag of dried fruit to make kompot when I got home ... but she didn't really give me very specific instructions. Fortunately, when I googled kompot, Wikipedia had a link to your 2010 post with a recipe. Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks. Now I'm going to cook up a batch to share with my family. Mmmmmm!

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    1. I love that one, it has such an interesting taste, very unusual and love it. Hope you will like it too :)

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