Google explicitly defines the long recipe pages

Google receives complaints about recipe pages getting longer. It got a lot of suggestions for more precise recipe pages. Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller gave this statement.

It was during the Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout. Mueller got this question from a food blogger. He was discussing the SEO implications of handling many contents. It is about the same recipe.

The main vision was to have a single page with one recipe. At the same time, the supporting pages about recipes are on separate pages.

Mueller believes in the creation of one page to focus on a recipe. He also feels this will result in a great structure for users. This is the most common and frequent feedback from the users.

Especially users saying there’s too much extra content on recipe pages. Mueller stated, “From Google’s point of view, this is not problematic.

It’s something where, especially with recipe content, I get a lot of complaints from people that felt like these are long recipes, and ‘I don’t have time to look at the life story, and go through all these other items on this page – I want the recipe.’

Mueller discussed the challenges of this approach. He stated that the major challenge is in balancing the strength of pages. A large number of articles about the same recipe will dilute the keyword. One way to strengthen this is to link to the supporting content from the main recipe. This will give Google a clear signal about the importance of pages.

He further added that balancing could become tricky. This is about the strength of Individual pages. Splitting things on the website needs indexing and internal linking. We can also link only the FAQ pages with the main recipe page.

In this way, we can show the FAQ page in the search results. This would happen when someone searches for something that’s within the FAQ part.

Mueller also brought the point of separating FAQ content. The one from a recipe makes sense for search.