Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do we keep Google from treating us as if we are a recipe site rather than a product website?
-
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...
We do rank well for our products in general searches but I want to be sure that our recipe setup isn't detrimental.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Tim, I have implemented product and recipe schema previously. So, it seems that I may have nothing to worry about on this front.
-
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?
-
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 hereAt 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.
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Migrating micro site into existing website
My company is planning to migrate an existing (ecommerce) micro site - which sits on its own domain - into their main ecommerce site. This means that the content will be moved from www.microdomain.co.uk to www.maindomain.com/category. Some products already exist on the main domain. The micro site is fairly small with just over 400 pages - I am planning to map each URL to the new URL (exact corresponding page) and create 301 redirects for each. Where any additional content does not exist yet on the existing main domain, we will create it and 301 redirect to it. The micro site currently ranks fairly well for some keywords - being such a specialised micro site, (some of) the keywords also form part of the domain name, however, they won't on the main page although they may form part of the URL (category). As an example (using a made up URL), our micro site www.bread-sticks.co.uk ranks on page 1 for the keyword bread sticks - we don't just sell bread sticks on www.bread-sticks.co.uk but also rolls and bread though, bread sticks is one category of very closely related categories. Say our main domain is www.supermarket.co.uk (selling a wide range of food / drink products. The micro site will be moving to www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ - which is a category. Within that category, there are sub categories, i.e. bread sticks, rolls and bread which will sit under www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ etc. What would be the best way for ensuring that our main domain would take over the rankings from our micro site, given that it will be sitting on our main domain as a category (one of many)? Can we expect www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ or www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ to replace www.bread-sticks.co.uk in the rankings simply by 301 redirecting? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | May 18, 2016, 5:21 AM | ViviCa10 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | Mar 31, 2015, 11:06 AM | eglove0 -
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | Feb 27, 2013, 2:34 PM | FDFPres0 -
Google Showing Multiple Listings For Same Site?
I've been optimizing a small static HTML site and have been working to increase the keyword rankings, yet have always ranked #1 for the company name. But, I've now noticed the company name is taking more than just the first position - the site is now appearing in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd position (each position referencing a different page of the site). Great.. who doesn't want to dominate a page of Google! ..But it looks kind of untidy and not usually how links from the same site are displayed. Is this normal? I'm used to seeing results from the same site grouped under the primary result, but not like this. any info appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | Oct 28, 2012, 10:50 AM | GregDixson0 -
How does Google find /feed/ at the end of all pages on my site?
Hi! In Google Webmaster Tools I find *.../feed/ as a 404 page in crawl errors. The problem is that none of these pages exist and they have no inbound links (except the start page). FYI, it´s a wordpress site. Example: www.mysite.com/subpage1/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage2/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage3/feed/ etc Does Google search for /feed/ by default or why do I keep getting these 404´s every day?
Technical SEO | Jul 16, 2012, 11:56 AM | Vivamedia0 -
Is it worth setting up 301 redirects from old products to new products?
This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed. There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time. So the options are: 1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules? 2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages? 3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?
Technical SEO | Apr 9, 2012, 2:59 PM | indigoclothing0 -
UK website ranking higher in Google.com than Google.co.uk
Hi, I have a UK website which was formerly ranked 1<sup>st</sup> in Google.co.uk and .com for my keyword phrase and has recently slipped to 6<sup>th</sup> in .co.uk but is higher in position 4 in Google.com. I have conducted a little research and can’t say for certain but I wonder if it is possible that too many of my backlinks are US based and therefore Google thinks my website is also US based. Checked Google WmT and we the geo-targeted to the UK. Our server is also UK based. Does anyone have an opinion on this? Thanks
Technical SEO | Nov 28, 2011, 7:45 PM | tdsnet0 -
What are the pros and cons of moving one site onto a subdomain of another site?
Two sites. One has weaker sales. What would the benefits and problems for SEO of moving the weak site from its own domain to a subdomain of the stronger site?
Technical SEO | Apr 14, 2011, 6:01 PM | GriffinHansen0