About Recipe SEO & Rich Snippet Lovin’
Thanks for stopping by!
Since you’re here on the “About” page, you surely want to know more about how Rich Snippets can help people find your recipes on search engines.
It’s not hard, and the hRecipe plugin makes it even easier!
Basically, the story goes a little like this:
Computers are really literal minded; they don’t understand recipes.
Which makes sense, right? Computers don’t eat, so why would they care about recipes?
But we eat, and we care about recipes, so…
…we want our computers to handle all those fiddly bits.
Using hRecipe plugin for WordPress let’s the computer take care of all those fiddly bits for you! You publish your recipe, Google grabs it and knows exactly how to display your recipe as a Rich Snippet. That’s just a fancy way to say they make it look cool and eye-catching for readers in the search engine. (Why these geeks have to make everything so complicated, right?)
Google *loves* hrecipe
See, here’s the deal: the hRecipe plugin is just a way to get the hrecipe microformatting Real Important But Boring Geeky Specification into Google. And Google likes that, they made a big announcement about it, even.
Using hRecipe plugin, all that specification stuff is under the covers. You don’t need to worry about it. It’s like magic.
hRecipe for WordPress allows you, the WordPress blogger, the power to provide rich, semantic information to search engines.
The power enjoyed by huge multimedia conglomerates such as Amazon.com and The Food Network.
And it’s super easy!
You can install hRecipe directly from your WordPress plugin interface, and use it immediately, directly and conveniently from your WordPress blog post and page editor.
Hi! Dave here…
Hi, I’m Dave Doolin, and I’ll be your programmer today…
I’ve been blogging for years, and you can find me all sorts of place on the web, from Facebook, to LinkedIn, to a bunch of my other blogs. I do most of my blogging at Website In A Weekend, where I have an amazing community of readers just like you. You can see most everything on my “dispatcher web page dool.in.
And I love programming too! I’m an active participant in the local (San Francisco Bay) WordPress and Ruby on Rails communities. These are great communities, and new people are welcomed with open arms. If you’re in the Bay Area (even for a visit), perhaps we’ll meet at a Meetup.
I’m easy to reach too. Leave a comment here or anywhere else on any of my blogs, or send me an email at david.doolin@gmail.com. Or just call if need to 510-334-4006. (I don’t pick up from “Unknown” or “Blocked” numbers though. I’m real and I want you to be real too.)
Oh yeah, find me on twitter, too: @websiteweekend.
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, thanks so much for all your hard work on the plugin. I’m just moving over to WP from Blogger and will need to re-do all my recipes anyway, so this will be a big help. One question, though… I’ve installed the plugin but when I click on the button (in HTML view) my screen goes gray. I’m using the latest version of WP and Thesis 1.8. Is this a bug? Or, does it not work on existing posts? It would be great for us newbies if your “About” page included instructions on how to use the plugin.
Thanks so much!
Stephanie, The Recipe Renovator
Stephanie, you’re quite welcome!
I just spent an hour or so looking over the code, and I’m seeing anything conflicting with the latest WordPress updates. That’s not to say there isn’t one! As noted over email, I’ll check through your plugin list.
Thanks again!
Hi Dave, Thanks for providing the plug-in. Yesterday I installed it and activated it but when I go to add a new post the star is grey and when I click on it, nothing happens. I uninstalled and re-installed but it still does the same thing. I have the latest version of Wordpress. I’ve visited the plugin info site and thought I did everything correctly but it’s not working. Can you advise me on how to get it working properly? Thank you.
If it was a Javascript conflict, it should be completely dealt with now. I sent you an email to update as well.
Hi, Dave.
I’m just starting my blog and can usually figure things out – but I can’t figure out why when I edit the .css it doesn’t change anything. It says the css file is inactive. Is that the problem? How do I activate it if it is? I just want to change the style! eeeek.
Thanks.
Kerry
Kerry, see if it works now with the new update. If it continues to be a problem, please add an issue here: https://github.com/doolin/hrecipe/issues
Thanks,
Dave Doolin
Hello,
I’m very pleased you made the hrecipe plugin, I really appreciate it.
I would like to make a couple of questions if you don’t mind:
- My website is in italian, can the plugin be translated and how do I do that?
- My recipes preparation have lots of step by step images that have to be included in the instructions but I see that the plugin doesn’t allow this, what’s your advice?
- Can I insert the hrecipe results after the “more” tag and can I use other good plugins for recipes such as more taxonomies, more fields etc. that are also good for recipes websites or will this be a problem for the google indexing?
It would be nice if the plugin had some sort of documentation since many people don’t really know if this plugin works by itself or if we still have to write the article normally and then use the plugin as an addon.
Thank you for your kind support.
Best Regards
Bernardino
Translations are not difficult, there is a .po file for it.
I have a number of blog posts for documentation, I’ll collect up some links for those and post them somewhere convenient, probably here in the main feed. Or at least links to them where they are already posted elsewhere.
I’ll be back in touch with you on email. Thanks for your time!
Is there a print feature that would allow users to print just the recipe?
Try the Print Friendly plugin. It’s pretty cool, allows you to select the parts you want to print.
Hey Dave,
Seems like a great tool so far, however I have run into a couple of errors I was hoping you could help me with.
http://www.hcgbyrevele.com/my-hcg-recipe-box/
Catchable fatal error: Object of class hrecipe could not be converted to string in /home/hcg/public_html/wp-includes/classes.php on line 277
When trying to upload an image from the image gallery:
Catchable fatal error: Object of class hrecipe could not be converted to string in /home/hcg/public_html/wp-includes/classes.php on line 277
Any help you can give would be great!
John, this is a brand new one on me.
Would you mind sending me a list of your installed and activated plugins? I’ll email you here in a minute so you can send them straight to me.
Thanks.
Hello Dave,
Out of the available plugins for (micro-formatted) recipes I like yours best. I tried them all and yours is most convenient and complete. Nevertheless I have two questions: 1| could you help me with some translation issues I have and 2| is is possible to change pre-populated lists?
1| My site is in Dutch and I translated most of the text. There are four lines however that I can’t manage to translate, being:
Preparation time: 15 minute(s)
Cooking time: 10 minute(s)
Diet type: Vegetarisch
Number of servings (yield): 4
Some of these items appear in Dutch on the back-end form, but the website shows the above mentioned.
2| Can I modify the lists (in the fields: diet type, recipe type and cuisine tradition) such that I can include my specific wishes?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Cheers.
Caspar, translation is lagging, I have to update the master files, which is going to be a day’s work or so, just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Items such as diet type, cuisine, etc are easy to add in to the form, and will be even easier to add after the next couple of releases. Please send me your suggestions, or open a Feature Request here: https://github.com/doolin/hrecipe/issues?labels=Feature+request&sort=created&direction=desc&state=open&page=1
Hi Dave,
Thank you VERY much for you hard work on this. You’re helping a lot of us get better…
Unfortunately, I can NOT make this work and I think it may have to do with the new Wordpress upgrade. I just upgraded to 3.2 before trying the plugin.
I initially tried editing an existing recipe, putting in the hRecipe values but it looked like it didn’t add anything to it. I even clicked on the HTML tag to see if there were any changes and couldn’t see any.
So, I tried putting up a brand new recipe with a blank page and then using the hRecipe plugin and it doesn’t add anything either.
One other variable that hopefully doesn’t factor in is that I’m using Chrome.
Any insight?
Thanks!
I have had a few people mention a problem, but I’m not able to recreate it with either WP 3.2.1 or Wp 3.3 (I run head locally as well).
The next release will have even more cleanup, so that might fix it. In any case, I’m interested in hearing your resolution no matter what.
Hi – loving the plug-in.
My star ratings are showing as question marks though – any ideas?
ps say nay to the horse its a beaut!
Could you send me details:
* Operating system and version
* Browser and version
* Version of WP and hrecipe.
I’ve had one other report, but I
haven’t been able to repeat it
myself.
Dave, Thanks so much for this awesome plugin!! I am starting my blog and have been looking for something like this.
I do have a question about an issue I ran into with a rather elaborate recipe. One of my recipes calls for multiple steps in the ingredients process, like dough, sauce, etc. Is there any way to break down the ingredients list into different sections for each part of the recipe so that it won’t confuse the readers?
Google & and the rich snippet format does not support recipes in multiple parts. There is exactly nothing I can do about that.
My advice would be to part the recipe out in pieces, subrecipes. Then assemble the pieces into a main recipe.
The problem really isn’t easy. Compounding it is the insistence of the Microformats group to not define a specification, but rather to “follow the elephant tracks.” That is, hrecipe attempts to codify what everyone is already doing, instead of specifying what they should be doing.
Google has slightly inverted this with rich snippets by insisting a recipe be marked up with a superset of hrecipe. This means a recipe rich snippet can be an hrecipe, but something complying to a minimal hrecipe may not be a valid rich snippet. For the plugin, I’m implementing to the rich snippet spec, which came out a year after I started the plugin.
Hi Dave,
Can you adjust quantities of a recipe on a fly with this plugin?
What I mean by this is the following:
Say I enter in this original recipe with directions which yields 8 servings
Potato Salad
2 pounds russet potatoes
1 cup mayonnaise
4 teaspoons sweet pickle relish
4 teaspoons white sugar
2 teaspoons chopped white onion
2 teaspoons prepared mustard
1 teaspoon white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon minced celery
1 teaspoon minced pimento
1/2 teaspoon shredded carrot
1/4 teaspoon dried parsley
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
salt to taste
If I needed to adjust this recipe for 38 people I’d like to be able type in “38″ into servings and the recipe would “calculate” on the fly to automatically adjust the quantities.
Is this possible?
Thanks for your time,
Upendra
Hi Dave – I just installed your excellent plugin and tested it on one of my husband’s little used non-recipe sites on a recipe I had already posted on my site some weeks ago. It works great but it got me wondering about the image. Is there no way in hRecipe to put in “photo” (I think that is the Rich Snippets word) information in?
Thanks again!
Abby
It’s actually really easy to do from the html side, relatively large pita to program it in from the visual editor side. I’ll put a comment up on website shortly.
I may do a Kickstarter campaign on this.
Hiya Dave :)
I remember you and Heather mentioning this semantic web stuff like ages and ages and ages ago. And last night as I was setting up my daily post for the main site and the community area I was feeling tired and a bit bleugh about typing the same things in the same place, having to remember the format etc. and you and this plugin of yours popped in my head.
Soooo, I installed it, tinkered with the code a little and voila! I’m using it on both the blogs for non-recipe stuff.
I have a question though … from an SEO perspective (because I remember you saying about how good this plugin is for recipe SEO) because I’m not using it for a recipe, is it going to help any with SEO and if not, would I be ok in assuming it’s not going to harm it?
Oh and thank you :) I can see this saving me a good half hour or so on a daily basis so I think that means you just gave me the gift of time. ;)