Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?

[RiseSEO]

Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.

[john4math]

Even though the recipes are the same, I doubt they'd be penalized for having duplicate content.  If the search engine decides that it's duplicate content, it may filter out one or the other, and may knock one page down in the search results.  If your first page of results was all the same page from different domains, the search engine would have failed you.  The duplicate content penalties you're thinking about are more for spammers and spam content, where they're duplicating a lot of content, and doing it intentionally.

In your example, there is a lot else on the page other than the ingredients and the recipes, so that also should mitigate some of the duplication, and they're also laid out a bit differently in the HTML between the two pages, one with divs and one with tables.

Sources:

• [Google Webmaster Central Blog '08](Google Webmaster Central Blog '08 )
• High Rankings Advisor (Jill Whalen) '10