Google Recipe Search Tool: What it Means for Food Recipe Bloggers

Last month, Google introduced a Recipe Search Tool. Basically the Google Recipe Search tool allows users to search by ingredients, calories, even how much time you have to cook. Google states that one percent of searches are for recipes, which doesn’t sound like much in terms of percentage, but that does equate to quite a few searches.

Google’s Recipe Search Tool functions automatically when you open up a search in Google for what it thinks is a recipe search. Note in the image above blue box around the word “Recipes.” In the image above, we’ve done a search for Chicken Pot Pie. On the sidebar to the left, you have the option of choosing ingredients to include, the cook time and even the amount of calories included in the recipe you are searching for.

While this has made it incredibly easy for those searching for recipes, it has not helped Food Recipe Bloggers with any sort of their recipe listings. You see, the big sites like Allrecipes.com, Food.com, and FoodNetwork.com are the sites that come up in the Google when recipes are searched, Food Recipe Bloggers did not rank well at all in these listings.

So, why are Food Recipe Bloggers not ranked well in Google’s Recipe Search Tool? Well, it has to do with the microformat that Google searches for when it is looking up recipes. Think of it like an html coding feature that most recipes blogs are not written in. Because Google uses this code to find recipes, Food Recipe Bloggers are eliminated from search results. And even if you know or learn the code, who has the time to go back through and re-code all your recipes anyway. We are Food Bloggers not programmers, right?

Thank goodness for wonderful and talented programmers who’ve swooped in and developed plugins for adding this feature to your site. This saves Food Recipe Bloggers from having to back in and all the dreadful coding to their sites to be found in Google’s Recipe Search Tool. Check out this HRecipe Plugin or this plugin,Recipe SEO Plugin for WordPress. They are FREE!

Of course these plugins are strictly for WordPress. We did find another tool that might be helpful if you are using another blogging platform, such as Blogger. This program generates the rich snippet code or microformat to put into the HTML of a blog post. Try it at The Recipe Wiz.