Beware: Spammy Recipe Markup Plugins

The Google Help Forums have been busy with a number of confused food bloggers wondering why they are getting manual actions due to Spammy structured markup. To read a few of these threads go here and here. And as reminder, the Spammy structured markup is defined as:

"Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google's Rich Snippet Quality guidelines.

The main issue around this penalty appears to be tied to two areas: recipe blogs appear to be dressing up non-recipe content as recipes and that's a violation; and user ratings should NOT be used on content that is not visible to users. Jennifer Slegg did some further investigating and found several recipe plugins that have been known to cause this manual penalty:

• WP-Ultimate Recipe
• Ziplist
• Yummly
• EasyRecipe Plus

If you've received one of these manual penalties until you clear it up, NONE of your structured data will show up in the search results. So, if this issue has affected you or one of your clients then go through the following steps to resolve it.

1. Update your plugins to their most recent version.
2. Update your WordPress framework to the most recent plugin (especially if running Genesis)
3. Do NOT add Recipe Markup to non-recipe pages.
4. Don't claim user ratings you do not have (Aggregate Rating Schema).
5. If you have 20 ratings showing 4 stars those ratings should be fully visible on the page you're marking up. If you aren't doing this, or at least providing a link to the ratings, then just disable this completely.
6. Next, document all of the steps you've taken to resolve the issue, link the updated pages, and then send it all in a reconsideration request to Google. Be sure to read our detailed guide, '