Web stories are an Instagram-stories style format that Google recently launched. They're a essentially a mobile-formatted slideshow that use images and video, and work well for recipes.
Think of web stories as a new form of mixed-media meant to be integrated into your recipe post and not as a standalone piece of content.
Just like you wouldn't create an archive or page dedicated to a single video or recipe card, the goal of web stories is to embed this web story into your pre-existing pages to present different ways of consuming the same content.
Here's what we currently know:
- Google views these as specific type of rich search result that are/will-be ranked based on quality signals
- other types of rich search results include videos, recipe cards and FAQ/How-to
- This Youtube video from the Google team provides background and insight into how web stories work
- The easiest way to build them is using the web stories plugin by Google
- This plugin generates a web-stories archive that is Yoast automatically generates sitemaps for - this is the primary way search engines discover web stories
- The web stories archive page is not designed for users and does not require the same formatting as categories - a user should never land on this page
- The Feast Plugin v.5.1.4 automatically removes web stories from WordPress search results, as well as removing post meta from the web stories archive page
- Web stories have their own carousel in search results
- The web stories are duplicate content to posts, provide inferior content, and are specifically only designed only for the web stories carousel in Google - whenever possible, link directly to the recipe post itself
- Due to very little available content (because they're new), they're easy to rank for relative to normal search results
- Web stories are ranked the same as web pages, and may one day require internal links to compete in the search results
- It's a good idea to link to the web story from the post it relates to, but it's not currently recommended to embed it directly into the post
- User experience is important - take the time to do these properly
- They should provide near-complete information on the search term - a recipe should have all the ingredients and process steps to make that recipe
- Use captions for video, for those with audio disabled
- Images and videos must be self-hosted, and can quickly use up a site's storage and bandwidth
Thanks to Andrew @ NerdPress, Casey @ Mediawyse and the team at Slickstream for sharing their knowledge. This page will be updated as new information comes to light.
Examples
Here are some examples:
- https://pinchofyum.com/web-story-sitemap.xml
- https://www.errenskitchen.com/web-story-sitemap.xml
- https://www.whiskaffair.com/web-story-sitemap.xml
A more thorough guide can be found on the Mediavine Web Stories page.
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