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  4. How do we keep Google from treating us as if we are a recipe site rather than a product website?

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How do we keep Google from treating us as if we are a recipe site rather than a product website?

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  • bearpaw
    bearpaw last edited by Jan 13, 2015, 1:02 PM

    We sell food products that, of course, can be used in recipes. As a convenience to our customer we have made a large database of recipes available. We have far more recipes than products. My concern is that Google may start viewing us as a recipe website rather than a food product website.

    My initial thought was to subdomain the recipes (recipe.domain.com) but that seems silly given that you aren't really leaving our website and the layout of the website doesn't change with the subdomain.

    Currently our URL structure is...

    • domain.com/products/product-name.html
    • domain.com/recipes/recipe-name.html

    We do rank well for our products in general searches but I want to be sure that our recipe setup isn't detrimental.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • gfiorelli1
      gfiorelli1 @bearpaw last edited by Jan 13, 2015, 8:16 PM Jan 13, 2015, 8:16 PM

      You can think about presenting the "related products" or the "related recipees" or the "most popular recipees" (if you have a user rating system up, so that users of the site can upvote a recipe or another) as normally blogs do with "related posts".

      I would present them below the product description and below the recipe, depending on the case.

      I would not hide them behind a tab, because of that alert Tim is writing about in his comment (which, if it is really so - someone should test it - could be an interesting option for hiding content that you don't want Google to consider for ranking reasons).

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • CommT
        CommT @bearpaw last edited by Jan 13, 2015, 2:56 PM Jan 13, 2015, 2:56 PM

        I'd include a button to say 'buy all ingredients for this recipe' and have it automatically add the ingredients to the users basket. Easy peasy user experience and you potentially get to increase the average basket value. Win win. You could also include individual buttons next to each product in the ingredients list on the recipe page (assuming it's labelled 'ingredients' and 'method'.)

        I also wouldn't hid any text if you can help it - especially content that triggers a sale.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • TimHolmes
          TimHolmes @bearpaw last edited by Jan 13, 2015, 1:25 PM Jan 13, 2015, 1:25 PM

          I read an article the other day about hidden content etc. I would recommend not doing so as Google will not necessarily count it. I would recommend having the links visible and accesible for both Google and the user.

          Here is the article I read.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • EGOL
            EGOL last edited by Jan 13, 2015, 1:33 PM Jan 13, 2015, 1:23 PM

            I would not worry one bit.  Not one bit.

            Those recipes have the names of your products in them as ingredients, thus they are related.  You probably link from recipe pages to product pages, that increases the relationship.

            If I owned your site, I would have at the bottom of my cinnamon page a link to every recipe that uses cinnamon.  On every recipe page I would have an ingredients list and beside each ingredient I would have two links... one to the page where I sell that ingredient and one to a article page that tells a lot of information about that ingredient.

            In my opinion, the key to successful online retail is NOT running a retail site, but instead, running an information site that also has a store.  All of my retail sites have more content pages than retail pages.  Sometimes that content is perfectly related one-on-one to to retail products, sometimes it is tangentially related, and sometimes it is kinda loosely related, but all of that content brings people in and some of those people buy and some of those people engage with the adsense that I have on the content pages.

            Lots of people type my domains into search engines, not because they want to buy something on my site but because they want to read something on my site.  Google sees these people asking for my sites by name.

            If anyone should be worried about you offering content on a product site it should be your competitors.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
            • bearpaw
              bearpaw last edited by Jan 13, 2015, 1:23 PM Jan 13, 2015, 1:23 PM

              Tim, I have implemented product and recipe schema previously. So, it seems that I may have nothing to worry about on this front.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • bearpaw
                bearpaw last edited by Jan 13, 2015, 1:20 PM Jan 13, 2015, 1:20 PM

                You're correct, we do currently link to products included in our recipes. I suppose you put me at ease though as I do not know enough about SEO to determine whether or not other-category information causes Google to interpret our sites purpose differently.

                On another note, you did spark a thought. We are linking our products from the recipe page but those links are hidden behind a products tab. Can you offer insight into how beneficial it would be to not "hide" that information in terms of SEO?

                TimHolmes CommT gfiorelli1 3 Replies Last reply Jan 13, 2015, 8:16 PM Reply Quote 0
                • TimHolmes
                  TimHolmes last edited by Jan 13, 2015, 1:20 PM Jan 13, 2015, 1:18 PM

                  I would think the best way to resolve this issue would be to apply schema data to the relevant products or recipes. This will then allow google to determine the correct placement for the respective items.

                  For recipe schema click here and
                  For product schema click here

                  At the base of each section it demonstrates how to implement the schema correctly.

                  I hope these help 🐵

                  Edit - as per Amelia, recipies placed next to products and vice versa could lead to a better user experience due to the relevent content being easily accesible.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                  • CommT
                    CommT last edited by Jan 13, 2015, 1:16 PM Jan 13, 2015, 1:16 PM

                    Why not use it to your advantage? E.G make all the products available in the recipes easy to buy from the recipe pages?

                    'Want to make this dundee cake? Buy all the ingredients here' (or similar).

                    You may of course already be doing this though.

                    I wouldn't have thought the presence of useful content to be a detriment to rankings.

                    Good luck!

                    Amelia

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
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