A few months back, we had told you about our whole new updated automated Recipe Index, which created an index for Cucumbertown food bloggers based on the properties that Google recognised. So these included things like the course, cuisine, difficulty, dietary restrictions and so on. This index would be created automatically based on the values the author was filling in the editor at the time of creating the post.

While this was being drafted out we had already started work on a mapping project to classify and bring together all the ingredients under different families. Earlier if you wanted to put all chicken recipes in one category, you would tag all chicken recipes as “chicken” and put that category listed in the RecipeIndex. Now we have automated this to include everything under a family of ingredients.

Let me give you an example.

Pork is an ingredient but pork is also the family head of all the ingredients like ham, bacon, sausages etc. But when you are categorising your recipes on the basis of ingredients, this family of ingredients is ignored and only the ones which have pork as a keyword would be included. Unless of course, you manually entered this every single time. Now it is possible to create a category in the RecipeIndex called ‘Pork’ which would include recipes with ingredients under the pork family.

Here’s an illustration that’ll give you an idea.

This ingredient mapping is now available to all bloggers via the RecipeIndex. So if you add ‘fish’ as a category in the Index, all recipes that have salmon, sardine etc. will be listed under this section.

When you think about it, this ingredient mapping is a very powerful feature with plethora of applications and we are just getting started here.

This is now available to all Cucumbertown bloggers and they can choose to add whichever ingredients they want in their recipe index. This is also great news from an SEO point of view. Having such an efficient internal indexing will enhance your recipes visibility on Google.

Here’s how Cucumbertown bloggers can add ingredients to the Recipe Index.

1. Go to your Manage Content tab.
2. Navigate to the Recipe Index Tab.

3. Click on the Edit button next to Ingredients.

4. Add the Ingredient you want to.

5. Click on Update.

6. Then at the bottom of the page, click on Update Recipe Index.

6. This is updated on your blog’s Recipe Index.

We are pretty sure the mapping tech has ticked off the grey area of your brain. The possibilities to search, classify etc. are endless. We’d love to hear what you think of this facelift to the Cucumbertown Recipe Index.