Another update in the revised Google Quality Raters Guidelines that was updated on January 23rd was that they added a section for recipe sites and said that requiring “significant scrolling” or making it hard to find the jump to recipe button is not a good thing.
I mean, we expected this, Google did issue a warning on this in October 2023.
This is found on page 77, under the section “Low: Recipe 3” and it reads:
Low Quality Justification:
- A large quantity of prominent filler makes it difficult to find the helpful MC
- Ads, SC and Filler MC distract from the helpful MC
Note, MC stands for “main content” and SC stands for supplemental content.
It goes on to read:
The primary purpose of the page is to share a recipe for Butterbeer. While helpful MC such as the ingredients and information about Butterbear are at the top of the page. significant scrolling is required to find the actual Butterbeer recipe. The “jump to recipe” link itself is difficult to find.
The page has a large amount of content unrelated to Butterbeer between the Butterbeer ingredients and the Butterbeer recipe. The page has photos and reviews of many other unrelated foods at universal studios. In addition, Ads and SC and interstitials appear throughout causing additional scrolling to finally find the recipe towards the bottom.
All of the above lead to a poor user experience.
Note: A higher rating could be appropriate if the page were better organized, the recipe was prominently placed and easy to find, and there was less Filler, SC and Ads distracting from the helpful MC.
This was spotted by Marie Haynes who posted about this on X – she wrote, “Heads up recipe sites. Here is an example added in this QRG update.”
Here is a screenshot of this section:
Google also shared this example recipe blog page screenshot – click to enlarge it:
Here is more from Marie:
Heads up recipe sites. Here is an example added in this QRG update.
“…significant scrolling is required to find the actual Butterbeer recipe. The “jump to recipe” link itself is difficult to find.”
“Note: A higher rating could be appropriate if
the page were better organized,… https://t.co/SMsH7mx7kY pic.twitter.com/xWMMqjgyVm— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) February 3, 2025
Forum discussion at X.