Dec 22, 2019
Looking for Guidance re: Recipe Rich Results and SERP Positions
I'm having trouble to see consistency in carousel features for some URLs. Eg I'll occupy the first position in regular SERPs, image at the top of image search, video at the top of video search. But I'm not getting the carousel position.
This is not happening for all queries on all URLs, so IMO this specific issue is not an across-the-board thing. One query where I show up in the carousel after a few scrolls is "shepherd's pie", even though neither my URL nor image/video assets are ranking near the top. One query where I just lost the carousel position recently is "crispy oven fried chicken" (which is also a lot less competitive vs "shepherd's pie", which makes it even more confusing).
The last time this happened, it was either due to a recipe rich snippet bug and the issue was resolved when requesting a recrawl through search console. Another time, the plugin I use for recipe markup failed to generate image thumbnails in the sizes Google likes to receive, updating the marked up image and requesting a recrawl immediately solved the issue.
This time however, I'm at a complete loss. I checked the structured data, cleaned up some HTML issues, compared HTML to competitors, compared to URLs on my own site that aren't showing this behavior... I can't find a specific reason why this might be happening. I'm not further down in the recipe carousel either, I'm just completely missing. It has to be either a technical issue or a content issue on my part, but I've exhausted all of my knowledge to resolve it.
My site is not ranking well in Google's SERPs across the board, never shows up in Discover or "interesting finds" either, so I'm thinking there's a bigger issue going on as well. But they seem to be two separate problems because I do see carousel positions for other search queries that have the content structured in the same way.
Any guidance as to where I should keep looking for technical or content errors is much appreciated!
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All Replies (5)
Dec 22, 2019
Regarding content, I liked your lemon cod baked fish recipe, but find the same article and photos on another site, with a different author's name.
I'm not sure that helps at all with your specific query, but I thought you would want to know.
Purely incidentally and unimportantly (just to show you I really did read your page!!!) in one place it says you have 3 children and in another place on the same page it refers to "both children". That seems a bit odd and distracting! But of course I am NOT asking about your private life!
Dec 22, 2019
Unfortunately, content theft is crazy in the recipe space (no idea what it's like in other niches to be fair, but recipe content gets stolen and republished a lot, mostly with a different author's name slabbed onto it without a link to the source). I see many instances where the stolen content ranks above my original, especially in carousel spots etc. I should probably do something about it if you found one right away. The three children (it's three, apparently I tend to forget to mention there's three, ahem) are keeping me on my toes ;-) but I'll have to find some time to look into this and hire out if necessary.
I guess people replicating my content and ranking well enough to get found with it means my content can't be that bad inherently? If only I could figure out which knot to untie to open the proverbial doors to endless amounts of organic search traffic (I exaggerate of course, but a reasonable increase is definitely what I'm striving for).
Jan 7, 2020
Jan 7, 2020
Nikolaj, I appreciate your thorough response! I'm looking into the knowledge panel, but I'm not sure how easy it is to get one in my line of work (I only know of physically published authors in my niche who have one). I'm still 100% for online transparency though. Like many sites, mine has a website name ("Savory Nothings") and then an author name on each published recipe article (my full name) that links to my "About" page where I share various ways in which I gained everyday expertise (and also some professional expertise) in my field. I also link to various authority sites online that have either featured me as an author, or my recipe content. Am I still missing anything there?
This particular website is a commercial project, but I got the impression Google My Business is for brick and mortar businesses? I don't want local information displayed in Google Maps, so I'm not sure how this would apply? I'd appreciate any clarification!
About the html code issues, I studied everything closely and fixed what I could. About everything else I'll need to reach out to theme and plugin developers, and some of the errors seem to be native to WordPress or the Genesis framework from StudioPress I'm using. Excessive DOM nodes is something I've been working on for a while and hope to further improve, but this is already half of what they used to be. Thankfully my page speed is still OK, but something I'm definitely working on.
I also scoured the best practices for article pages you linked to, and other than the title not displaying above all of the other content, I'm not sure if I'm contradicting anything else? I changed the order of elements above the fold to better communicate the page title and to display the date and author more prominently. Do I need to go back and check again?
Jan 7, 2020