Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said that Google may soon target or penalize recipe collection pages using recipe structured data, when recipe structured data should be used on pages that list out the food item and include both ingredients and steps.
Sullivan wrote on X, he passed the examples of sites doing this along to the team that handles this and “I’m hoping that will lead to this type of behavior being curbed,” he said.
He wrote:
We’re aware some do this against our guidelines. I wouldn’t recommend doing it. I’ve passed this on to the team involved before, and I’m hoping that will lead to this type of behavior being curbed.
The example given was this screenshot:
As it says in Google’s documentation, “A non-recipe item has been marked as a recipe. A recipe must be for a food item and include both ingredients and steps.” The guidelines add, “Use Recipe structured data for content about preparing a particular dish. For example, “facial scrub” or “party ideas” are not valid names for a dish.”
Also, last October, Google spoke about the issue with recipe content in general, saying make sure the key parts of the recipes are accessible in the primary content. Did anything happen with that?
So be careful how you implement recipe structured data, or any structured data or Google can take it away or worse, if you are doing it wrong.
