One SEO professional asked John Mueller during the submitted Question and Answer segment of his hangout about moving FAQ content to a separate page.
The situation is: they have a food blog website. Their recipe posts are long form and straight to the point. John commented that he thought that longform, straight to the point, and recipe content was a weird mixture, but okay.
At the end of the post, they put an internal link for 20 separate FAQ posts about that recipe.
And they also include pro tips in the recipe itself, so that even if readers don’t click on the FAQ link, they can still make the recipe. The FAQ source is an additional reading source for them.
Their question is: is their content strategy okay from an SEO perspective? With separate FAQ posts for each recipe, they are providing the best user experience by giving users additional information about how to make the recipe better, even if they have to click out of the original recipe to get that information.
John answered that he believes it’s a perfectly fine strategy. From Google’s point of view, this is definitely not problematic.
Especially with recipe content, John gets many complaints from people that these are long recipe posts, and they don’t have time to read the life story and go through all these other items on the page. The reader really just wants the recipe and that’s it.
John explains that if they can separate the recipe out and focus on the recipe itself, rather than all the questions about the recipe, that would be good.
From a user perspective, John thinks doing this sounds great. He thinks the balance may be tricky regarding how strong the individual pages are made.
In particular, if you’re splitting things on your site, perhaps regarding internal linking, as well as the fact that suddenly, every recipe becomes two pages, then of course, Google has to index two pages per recipe, and they have to give value to two pages per recipe, which means you are diluting the quality of these pages quite a bit.
On the other hand, if you set up the FAQ pages where they are only linked from the recipe, and the primary content on your site is the recipe itself, then John would expect that Google will be able to focus on the recipe.
And, if someone searches for something that’s within the FAQ portion of that recipe page, then Google will be able to show the FAQ page in the search results.
This happens at approximately the 40:33 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 40:33
We have a food blog website, our recipe posts are long form and straight to the point. I don’t know long form, straight to the point, and recipes. Sounds like a weird mixture, but fine. At the end of the post, we put an internal link for separate 20 FAQ posts about that recipe.
And let’s see, we include pro tips in the recipe itself, such that even if readers don’t click the FAQ link, they can still make the recipe. The FAQ post is like an additional reading source for them. My question is: is our content strategy okay from an SEO point of view?
With separate FAQ posts for each recipe, we are providing the best user experience by giving them additional information about how to make the recipe better, even if they have to click out of the original recipe to get that information.
John (Answer) 41:25
I think that’s a perfectly fine strategy. So from Google’s point of view, this is definitely not problematic. It’s something where, especially with recipe content, I get a lot of complaints from people that these are long recipes. And I don’t have time to look at the life story and go through all of these other items on this page. I really just want the recipe.
So if you can separate that out and focus on the recipe itself, and maybe separate out some of the more, I don’t know, the questions around that recipe. From a user point of view, that sounds like a great thing. It is something where I think the balance might be tricky with regards to how strong you make these individual pages.
In particular, if you’re kind of splitting things up on your website, maybe with regards to internal linking as well, that suddenly every recipe ends up being two pages, then, of course, we have to kind of index two pages per recipe, and we have to give kind of value to two pages per recipe, which means you’re potentially diluting things a little bit.
On the other hand, if you set it up in a way that maybe the FAQ pages are only linked from the recipe and the primary content on your website is the recipe itself, then I would expect that we’d be able to kind of focus on the recipe. And if someone searches for something that’s within the FAQ part of that recipe, then we will be able to show the FAQ page in the search results.
From a structured data point of view, from a rich results point of view, people sometimes like to put FAQ markup on all pages, because it adds extra room in the search results. I think that’s kind of almost like on the way out, from our point of view, in that we’ve seen that people do this. And we do try to reduce the amount of FAQ entries that we show in the search results.
Just because it’s not that useful for users where every result has some kind of this set of FAQs on it. So moving that out to a separate page, from my point of view, makes sense there too, in that you’re not kind of like over burdening the recipe result with all of this extra structured data, you’re really kind of like: if people want more information, we have that information. If people just want to focus on the recipe,
We have that information as well. Yeah, I’m curious to see what kind of feedback we get about recipes. It’s always one of those tricky topics.
