Automatically Generating Rich Snippets For Recipes

I’ve been blogging on and off about my experiences and progress with dieting over on my diet blog.

One of the things that I’ve also been doing is sharing recipes for the various things I’ve been eating.

In order to display them “sanely” I opted for a WordPress plugin called “Easy Recipe” mainly for the display. I wasn’t as concerned with the rich snippets and microformat stuff that it also can handle I just wanted recipes to show up clearly.

Here’s one for chicken with olives

What’s interesting, however, is how it displays in Google search:

Not incredibly exciting, but that will depend on how much data you provide.

Running the recipes through Google’s rich snippet tool shows how well it works.

The tool is also handy to check if your site is setup with the “author” attribute for your posts, which you can do via Yoast’s SEO plugin

Of course my dieting blog isn’t all about recipes and doesn’t get that much traffic anyway, but it’s still nice to see how using a simple plugin can help with Google and other search engine’s understanding what the content is about.