Squirrel of the Month: February 2012

I wished for more squirrels and I got some. And I decided to share pics of some funny ones with you.

Meet the "Miss Back Yard February'12":

Google's Recipe Rich Snippets Markup

It looks like I finally managed to convince Google to use recipes info provided in rich snippets info of my cooking site in the search results.

It would be a sarcasm to say it doesn't feel like almost 2 years passed since Google announced recipe snippet format.

And now, after testing over and over, trying couple of different formats, making sure page with markup loads as fast as I can get it to, talking to the silent wall of rich snippet testing tool which gives you everything but useful info about why the formatting of your snippet may be not the correct one and how can you fix it... I finally got it right or at least to the certain extend: review numbers are not showing up in the results, but at least cooking times are and, most importantly, images.

So here are the things which worked for me, maybe some of them will safe some time for you:

• Scheme.org recipe rich snippet format - easiest and cleanest to implement
• Hacked wordpress to not use any other microformat: comments template has hcard in markup and post has hentry one that makes them to take over recipe formatting and only comments were showing up in testing tool
• Removed rel attributes from tag-links, category-links and links in blog roll
• Made sure that all marked up info is also visible to human visitor, so no <meta itemprop...> unless it is followed with text which explains it

Funny enough that the last issue was pointed to me by Google itself in email with "Rich Snippets Implementation" subject which I received after my second to last attempt to submit my site to rich snippets submission form. I didn't receive any reply from that form submission before, so it felt like I was almost there, just had to fix that small issue with visible content.

Would it be so hard to add this kind of check/error/message to the rich snippet testing tool results, nobody knows...