Making Sense of Google Recipe View and Microformats

I’ve had a number of my food blog clients ask me about the Google’s “Recipe View” in the search results. Google is indexing recipes from food blogs that comply with certain formatting rules and then serving up the results under a section called “Recipes.”

In order to have your recipe show up in these search results, the recipe must be formatted in a very specific way and each part of the recipe needs to get wrapped in an applicable tag.

Numerous plugins (listed at the end of this post) have appeared to make it easy to publish your recipe and then automatically render it with the correct tags so that Google will index it as a recipe.

To help answer some questions about the Google Recipe View and Microformats, I conducted this interview with Dave Doolin, the developer of the hRecipe plugin.

TB: What is all this we’re hearing about Google recipe view and the various formats like Microformats, Microdata and RDFa’s? Could you help clarify what all this means?

Dave: These are all specifications which can be used for metadata, that is, data about data. In this case, using microformats or RDFa for describing a recipe description. Computers aren’t very good with context, and metadata is a step in the direction of providing context to the computer.

TB: So when we speak of “rich snippets” which of these 3 formats is that referring to, and why is it important?

Dave: As near as I can figure from Google’s slightly inconsistent documentation, Rich Snippets is its own thing, but draws heavily on the other specifications. To be more precise, a Rich Snippet incorporates elements of hrecipe microformat, but requires a superset of the microformat. Google requires some things which hrecipe states as optional.

TB: Tell me a little more about your plugin and how it fits into all of this

Dave: I started hrecipe over two years ago for several reasons. One of these was to dig further into metadata description, something in which I’ve had a long term interest. My main interest at that time was actually specifying little programs called “regular expressions.” Without going into detail, the nature of a regular expression makes it very difficult to index in search engines, and difficult to search for as well. Metadata description, i.e., microformatting is one way around this impasse.

Recipes, however, are much more popular, and very interesting in their own right. And recipes had the benefit of having a microformat already specified: hrecipe.

TB: Could you provide some details about your plugin features, like does it offer the ability to print recipes, is it easy enough to restyle it using css, etc.

Dave: CSS styling is fairly easy for technical users. Printing can be handled as well as any other blog post, there are numerous plugins for this. Implementing printing specifically for hrecipe output is a bit more problematic.

For example, one of my users wants recipes printable to 4×6 card format. It’s doable, but it is time consuming and takes away from what I consider more important challenges. I do, however, open customer feedback!

For both printing and css, I’d like to offer a super simple interface in the future. I have a couple of ideas which could work really well, and which I have never seen anyone else implement for plugins.

TB: So which Google standard does your plugin use?

Dave: hrecipe targets Google’s rich snippet specification. As noted above, the other specifications are independent of rich snippet.

TB: How would you suggest food bloggers get all their previously published recipes into the new format?

Dave: This is a data entry problem. I’m going to be really blunt about this one: If they have a lot of recipes, they should set up a dummy blog, have the recipes transferred using Mechanical Turk, then copy the microformatted recipes back to their main blogs. This will cost a small amount of money to be sure, but not that much, and will save them huge time.

Alternatively, they can simply replace the recipes on a case by case basis, as they have time.

There *may* be automated tools hanging around the internet for doing translated from free text into structured recipe data. I haven’t found any yet, albeit I haven’t looked that hard yet. Such tools can get maybe 75% of a recipe structured correctly. The rest has to be done manually. It turns out to be a really hard problem in general, which is why you don’t see such tools everywhere.

TB: Can we add images together with the recipe output from your plugin?

Dave: Technically, for anyone who knows a little bit of html and css, it’s trivial to drop in an image. Just add the image within the hrecipe div or fieldset element of the blog post. Not really different than adding an image to a blog post.

However, for non-technical users, creating an interface for adding photos is more challenging. As a software designer, now I have to make some decisions: the easier I make adding an image, the less flexible the tool becomes. For example, I could expand the hrecipe element class to include the entire blog post, then restrict a section of it to be the required microformatting. Then rich snippets will pick up the first image. Unfortunately, it will also pick up the rest of the blog post, which defeats the notion of having tightly defined recipe data.

I could add a field for an image URL, but people would need that URL in advance (working on solving this right now).

In short, adding images is like everything else: there’s no one way to do it, and every implementation has pros and cons.

TB: If this question does not apply to you, please ignore it but on one of the plugins I notice there is an options to use either a div, or a fieldset for the recipe structure. Could you explain the difference.

Dave: This is purely a formatting issue. Fieldsets are an interesting and useful formatting technique which deserves much wider adoption. Some people really like using fieldsets, once they understand the concept. With hrecipe, they get the option.

TB: Would you recommend that food bloggers begin using this going forward and then go back and re-enter their old recipes over time?

Dave: Absolutely. There are several plugins for adding microformatting. They differ primarily in ease of use and power. The most powerful one I’m familiar with requires a fairly substantial investment to master. For hrecipe, I chose to make it very fast and simple, but it doesn’t have quite as much power (yet).

Blogging is part of the marketing department of a small business and it has its own IT considerations. While hrecipe serves a wide range of WordPress users, serious food bloggers have an opportunity to influence its direction to better suit their business needs.

For a food blogger, my advice is just pick one you like and make it happen. Each time you add a new recipe, convert one of your old recipes. You will have them done in no time.

TB: Is there anything else you might want to add that could be beneficial to the readers?

Dave: Sure! I’m coming at this problem from a blogging and data description/data analysis perspective. This means I really get the blogging side of the food blogging equation (which many food bloggers are weak on, frankly), and I get the data side of it. For the food side, I’m building a community of food bloggers with passion for both food and blogging.

And that passion for blogging is important.

Blogging is part of the marketing department of a small business and it has its own IT (information technology) considerations. While hrecipe serves a wide range of WordPress users, serious food bloggers have an opportunity to influence its direction to better suit their business needs.

For many food bloggers, the big question is whether to invest the time and not only go back to reformat old recipes, but also to format new recipes so they are correctly indexed by Google for Recipe View. There seems to be a difference of opinion as to whether you should bother with this. Some bloggers feel it’s essential, whilst others feel that they would rather focus their energies on creating quality recipes and post.

Let us have your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

Recipe Plugins

• Recipe SEO Plugin
• hRecipe Plugin
• East Recipe Plugin
• RecipePress Plugin
• Ziplist Recipe Plugin

• Slice and dice your recipe search results
• Google Recipe View
• Google launches microformat-powered recipe search
• hRecipe Specification
• Rich snippets testing tool
• How I adapted my blog to Google’s recipe search
• Google Webmaster Tools

Tagged as: food blogging, WordPress, WordPress Plugins