We get asked about people wanting to create outdated "All Recipes" pages, so here's the complete documentation.
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Display all recipes
To display all recipes, create a new category called "All Recipes" and assign all your recipes to it. The end.
Note that this category will be thin content unless you add unique content, and creates a lot of pagination that wastes Google's time crawling and indexing. Thin, low-quality content has negative ramifications site-wide since the Google Help Content Updates (HCU) in 2023 and 2024.
Creating an "All Recipes" category is a poor experience for both Google and your users.
Don't do this
Nobody wants to scroll through an unorganized list of every recipe you've made, which is what an "All Recipes" page is.
Instead, you should:
- create a Modern Recipe Index
- properly organize your posts into categories
- let users use the search function on your site
Lori says
Hi Skylar - I have an All Recipes category (from 2018 when I created my site), and it only just now occurred to me that maybe I should No Index it. In this case, is that what you would recommend? And if I were to no index it, I suppose I shouldn't link to it from the Recipe Index? Thanks!
Skylar says
We strongly recommend creating new "All Recipes" categories because they're just useless to visitors. But if you have an existing site it would be dangerous for me to blanket-recommend everyone noindex it. I don't know whether anyones particular site is properly structured otherwise, eg. are all the recipes properly categorized into one or multiple, more appropriate categories, each with high quality content, and are those categories properly linked from posts and other categories and the recipe index? Every site is 100% unique.
So no, I wouldn't recommend noindexing an existing "All recipes" category. What you should do instead, is make sure that EVERY POST on your site is set to 1-2 more appropriate categories, with a primary category properly set, with high quality unique content on those category pages.