In the 09/03/2021 John Mueller hangout, one webmaster was concerned regarding structured markup for recipes.
There are a number of sites using structured markup for lists of recipes showing up in the top stories carousels.
John explained he thinks it’s a bug. He thinks this is something that Google shouldn’t be showing rich results for. In their guidelines for structured markup for recipes, the only thing that should be marked up is one item on the page.
A list should not be marked up with structured recipe markup.
John thinks the smarter approach would be to see if they can algorithmically deal with the websites that are using structured recipe markup on lists rather than individual recipes.
He mentioned that the better solution would be to see if there’s a way to scale this instead of manually chasing everybody down.
This discussion occurs at the 7:34 mark in the video:
John Mueller Hangout Transcript 09/03/2021
Webmaster 5 7:34
Um, my question is specifically around structured markup for recipes. And the reason why I’m asking this question is because I’m seeing long-form articles, for instance, listicles ranking for recipe carousels. And because those pages have been marked up as recipes. For instance, if you Google for things like easy lunch ideas, easy dinner ideas, you will see lists being ranked under recipe carousels. So I was wondering if it’s like websites trying to game the system, or if it’s a bug by Google or something along those lines?
John 8:06
I think it’s something along those lines. So I saw your question in the YouTube questions as well. And I took a look at some of those results. And that seems like something that we shouldn’t be showing rich results for. So in particular, in the rich results guidelines, we do have that it should be just one item on the page. And it shouldn’t be like a list of recipes for you to use the recipe markup. So on the one hand, that’s something where, I think, we could potentially take manual action with a webspam team on that. When we take manual action on rich results, usually, that means we would just not show the rich results for those sites.
But because, at least the examples that you gave, there seems like something where they’re just a lot of websites that are doing this, I think this smarter approach would be on our side to see if we can algorithmically recognize and kind of just not show those rich results for those kinds of pages. So instead of manually trying to chase everyone down, find a way to do that in a more scalable way.
Webmaster 5 9:28
Thank you. That was actually my follow-up question.
John 9:31
Cool. Okay. Yeah, I think it’s, it’s always awkward to see these kinds of examples where when you look at our guidelines, and you look at the results, it’s like, oh, it just doesn’t really match. And especially when there are a lot of sites like this, but this is the kind of feedback that is very useful for the folks that work on the algorithms.
