Google’s John Mueller said in Friday’s video that he reviewed a bunch of recipe related queries and notices a nice number of sites using rich results markup incorrectly. He said it might lead Google to automating the removal of those rich results for those sites.
He said structured data for rich results, including recipe listicles, should not be used on list pages. He said “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.”
John said that based on the queries given in the example question “they’re just a lot of websites that are doing this.” So he said “I think the smarter approach would be on our side to see if we can algorithmically recognize this and kind of just not show those rich results for those kind of pages. So instead of manually trying to chase everyone down, find a way to do that in a more scalable way.”
So maybe, just maybe, in the nearish future, you may see a lot of these recipe sites lose some of their rich results.
This came up at the 8:20 mark into the video.
Question:
Is structured data penalty a thing and enforced? There are many listicle type articles pages being marked up as recipes and have managed to rank on a recipe carousel, for example if you search for easy dinner ideas, you will see what I mean.
Answer:
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 the 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 the examples that you gave there seem like something where they’re just a lot of websites that are doing this, I think the smarter approach would be on our side to see if we can algorithmically recognize this and kind of just not show those rich results for those kind of pages. So instead of manually trying to chase everyone down, find a way to do that in a more scalable way.
Glenn Gabe spotted this:
Using recipe markup for articles or listicles & showing up in the recipe carousel? -> Via @johnmu: That’s not something we should be showing rich results for. It could lead to a manual action, but might be smarter for Google to handle algorithmically: https://t.co/at4xOumxLe pic.twitter.com/x8G0eWn3Iz
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 3, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Rosh Hashanah.
