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
-
How to show number of products in your Google SERP?
I have used to rich snippet to my website & everything is working fine except showing the total number of products listed in the particular category. Check out the screenshot below: aH7XM
Technical SEO | | promodirect0 -
How preproduction website is getting indexed in Google.
Hi team, Can anybody please help me to find how my preproduction website and urls are getting indexed in Google.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
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 | | eglove0 -
Duplicate content on Product pages for different product variations.
I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | bobjohn10 -
How to fix Google index after fixing site infected with malware.
Hi All Upgraded a Joomla site for a customer a couple of months ago that was infected with malware (it wasn't flagged as infected by google). Site is fine now but still noticing search queries for "cheap adobe" etc with links to http://domain.com/index.php?vc=201&Cheap_Adobe_Acrobat_xi in web master tools (about 50 in total). These url's redirect back to home page and seem to be remaining in the index (I think Joomla is doing this automatically) Firstly, what sort of effect would these be having on on their rankings? Would they be seen by google as duplicate content for the homepage (moz doesn't report them as such as there are no internal links). Secondly what's my best plan of attack to fix them. Should I setup 404's for them and then submit them to google? Will resubmitting the site to the index fix things? Would appreciate any advice or suggestions on the ramifications of this and how I should fix it. Regards, Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
How to remove all sandbox test site link indexed by google?
When develop site, I have a test domain is sandbox.abc.com, this site contents are same as abc.com. But, now I search site:sandbox.abc.com and aware of content duplicate with main site abc.com My question is how to remove all this link from goolge. p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages: However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling. Any thoughts would be appreciated! DyWRP.png
Technical SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI0