RDFa / Microformat - Recipe markup standards

Question

I wonder if anyone can help?

After Google announced that it will take note of RDFa / Microformats for online recipes, I've been looking into this for a couple of recipe based sites I run. However we simply don't have all the required data to fulfill any of the standards.

Does this matter? Will search engine crawlers still make the most of what they do find, or by missing a few elements (like a review or recipe rating) will I be wasting my time implementing this?

Also, if, for formatting reasons, I have to add extra divs around the information, does that invalidate it all?

Cheers, H

Answer 1

The only "must have" tag is the name of the recipe, the fn class if you go with microformats. This however must be the child of a parent which has the hrecipe class name to help the indexers distinguish between the special data and standard text.

BUT! The support for this was just released and I can't tell you if including only the recipe name will help you in any way; since it's a matter of a few changes, you probably want to test it on a site, wait a few weeks and apply to the rest of the sites if it works.

Regarding the extra DIVs, it shouldn't make any difference.

Answer 2

Have a look to hRecipe draft specification.

The hRecipe schema consists of the following properties:

* hrecipe
      o fn. required. text. the name of the recipe.
      o ingredient. required. 1 or more. text with optional valid (x)HTML markup.
            + value and type. optional. [experimental] 
      o yield. optional. text.
      o instructions. optional. text with optional valid (x)HTML markup.
      o duration. optional. 1 or more. text.
      o photo. optional. 1 or more. using any element containing a URL, such as IMG. [experimental]
      o summary. optional. text. [experimental]
      o author. optional. 1 or more. [experimental]
      o published. optional. [experimental]
      o nutrition. optional. 1 or more. [experimental]
            + value and type. optional. [experimental] 
      o tag. optional. 1 or more. [experimental] 

If you look at required fields fn and ingredient are mandatory, the others fields are optional.
The following example is a valid hRecipe recipe:

  <div class="mydivclass1">
   <h1 class="fn">Spaghetti al ragù</h1>
     <div class="myfancydiv2>Ingredients:</div>
   <span class="ingredient">
      spaghetti
   </span>
   <span class="ingredient">
      ragù
   </span>
 </div>

To check your microformats, you could use the cool Optimus validator.