Skip to Content

Food Blogger and How To Blogger SEO Updates

Tips and ideas for how to update your Food Blogger and How To blogger SEO efforts for the latest SEO updates. All the latest SEO news and hints for what might be going on in the Google search world!

SEO News for Food and How To Bloggers

please note :: I often recommend resources, some I receive an affiliate commission for at no additional cost to you! check out my policies here

Travel Blogger Views Dropping From November Update 12/3/2019

Lia over at Social Slaying has written an awesome post about her thoughts on how the update affected the travel bloggers. Here are some key takeaways I got!

  • Travel and food bloggers were the hardest hit.
  • According to Danny Sullivan (Google guy) the main thing this update was focused on was relevance.
  • There is a bug in Google snippet images which would for sure effect travel and food bloggers.
  • There is a TON of info before the first “real” search result.
  • Recency of publication might be a factor in sites that didn't lose rankings.

Read their full article about the November 2019 update and travel bloggers.

Why Food Blogger Views Have Decreased 11/23/2019

November 2019 has been hard on my food blogger friends. Google views are down and I think I may have found a reason why! The more we know the more we can try to change things to help Google show our sites more!

There is one pretty obvious thing that Google changed recently that could change views from the search engines.

Both of today's news items were found by Barry Schwartz of SEORoundtable that has an awesome weekly roundup of SEO news if you are super nerdy SEO wonk like me!

Google Is Testing A Rich Results Box Feature For The Search Carousel

This feels to me a lot like what is happening with the Pinterest videos where the engagement might be super high and the click throughs super low.

Now searchers can see multiple recipes without having to click to the site, and then bounce back to the search results page.

This is good for Google whose goal is to provide the best results to their users, but might be bad for food bloggers.

That said, I have seen a number of bloggers say that while their views are down their ad revenue has stayed close to the same because of increased page views or time on site. Also RPMs are higher this time of year.

Q&A

After reading the article, I'm not clear on what changed. Is this about the 4 block carousel that is already appearing on mobile? Brandi Crawford of Stay Snatched

Yes, but now instead of the clicks on a carousel item going to your site it pops up another “preview” that still doesn't go to your site! 

Good news! Google Rich Results Test Shows Google Home & Smart Display Previews 11/23/2019

This is super cool! It lets you see how your results will look in search!

1. Go to the rich testing tool https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

2. Put in a page that has “recipe” or “how to schema” – I use the Create plugin from Mediavine for this!

It will show that your page is eligible for rich results AND show how it will look in search results!

What it will look like if you have pictures with each step…

Picture of rich results with pictures

And what it will look like this without pictures…

Picture of rich results without pictures

This is awesome as it lets you see how your pages will show up in search.

That said, I think it also means that we NEED to be focusing on adding a rich result in every page to have the best chance of ranking on Google.

A rich result comes from Schema (the computer language Google uses). This is done through “Cards” in your posts. Food bloggers use recipe cards and How To bloggers use How To cards.