RecipeIndex: Making Food Blogging Incredible
When we launched the RecipeIndex, it was meant to be the easiest way a blogger could build a glossary. Doing something like this on another platform was not just difficult but too demanding. So most bloggers either failed to keep the recipe index up-to-date or they were simply incorrect, confusing the audience.
For us, the RecipeIndex is one of the most important parts of a blog. Perhaps the most IMPORTANT. Our data continues to show that a RecipeIndex page is where your audience spends the most amount of time and the space to discover hundreds of recipes that is otherwise close to impossible to DISCOVER.
Another important reason to keep the RecipeIndex updated is Google. For Google, the RecipeIndex page represents the best path to finding all your recipes. Bloggers often confuse sitemaps for this. But nothing competes with a RecipeIndex page that is visible to users. So much that if you find one of the recipes missing in the RecipeIndex consider that Google might not find it to index unless linked.
We want to make the process of keeping the RecipeIndex updated as automated as possible. And to do that we rely on something very important — Structured Data.
Early on when we were migrating our initial food blogs we had a lot of difficulties convincing our bloggers on how important structured data in recipes were as opposed to poetic language. Bloggers loved their style but sometimes this interfered with the ability to generate structured data and now as a result a good Recipe Index.
For example:
1 Kilo Roma Tomatoes is always better than, one kilo of sweet and tender Roma tomatoes.
For those who have got their recipe ingredient data right, we are now releasing tools to keep the page updated.
Part one of this requires that you move recipes to ingredient families.
While we released this capability sometime back there was very little adoption. We also understood that it was difficult for bloggers to comprehend the importance or the power of “ingredient families”.
So today we are releasing a tool to discover and classify ingredient families.
You can browse the tool over here.
Once you discover the family for your recipes, add them to the RecipeIndex as shown below.
From then on every new recipe written with this ingredient under this family with be automatically added to the corresponding category in the RecipeIndex page.
I hope at this point you realize how important structured data is.
In addition to the first tool, we’ll also be sending out a fortnightly email that tells you if you have missed adding recipes to the RecipeIndex. The mail will be a bit nagging until you have added all the recipes to the RecipeIndex.
It’s time to do some house cleaning now.
If you have listed your ingredients by tagging them as a category, stop. Remove them and index them via the ingredient family. It’s the right way.
We have a lot planned with the ingredient family. Imagine all blogs on Cucumbertown with the same ingredient family connected?
That’s the power of structured data!
