It just goes to show you how much of an impact SEO has on the business world regardless of niche when celebrities get involved and speak up about Google SEO directly with a harsh viewpoint on Google’s search landscape. Such as in the case of Meathead Goldwyn, the celebrity pitmaster, who has recently revealed that he has spent $300,000 in the past 5 years rebuilding his site to meet Google’s strict search guidelines.
Meathead, who first criticized site’s recipe search system in 2011, is especially critical of Google when it comes to Google recipe rankings and how Google displays recipes in search results and has recently been vocal on the subject once again. “Engineers at Google have changed the way cooks write recipes,” Meathead tweeted on Christmas Eve. Some of his site’s best-loved recipes have been replaced by “oven-baked” barbecue and “crockpot” ribs on the first page of Google results.
Recipe SEO Is A Bit Of A Pain
To be fair, my experience with recipe SEO is limited as I have had only 1 client in my life that needed this service. Furthermore, there has never been much transparency on how Google ranks recipes.
Recipe SEO is more technical because of the Recipe schema. Lots and lots of details need to be added just to have a chance at entering the carousel displayed in Google Search. It’s very tedious work to be perfectly honest but it needs to be done if you want the best chance. The schema itself is a set of data-formatting specifications which standardize recipes across websites so that Google and other tech companies can display them to their users.
It’s not clear if recipe ratings are a valid ranking signal but, according to a recent article from Slate, “Google’s recipe ratings are meaningless.” I know from my own searches that subjective titles seem to have an effect as I often have seen “best” “easy” “fast” and other attractive adjectives as far as cooking goes. Of course, this is personal experience comprised of a handful of searches over the years so hardly a valid proof but do your own search on “chocolate brownie recipe” and see if the “best” one comes back. For me the top 3 results were the “best” whatever that means as I feel people have their own opinions about most food, unless you want me to believe that everyone thinks See’s candy is better than Godiva’s. I like See’s but maybe you like Godiva better. Sure, most people can agree when food is bad but when two delicious dishes are pitted against each other I feel like it will be a matter of personal preference among the masses to determine which is best.
Recipe SEO becomes frustrating fast and the best synopsis on it as of late can be represented by some recent words from Meathead Goldwyn himself:
“It’s Google’s world, and we just live in it.”