I would not worry one bit.  Not one bit.

Those recipes have the names of your products in them as ingredients, thus they are related.  You probably link from recipe pages to product pages, that increases the relationship.

If I owned your site, I would have at the bottom of my cinnamon page a link to every recipe that uses cinnamon.  On every recipe page I would have an ingredients list and beside each ingredient I would have two links... one to the page where I sell that ingredient and one to a article page that tells a lot of information about that ingredient.

In my opinion, the key to successful online retail is NOT running a retail site, but instead, running an information site that also has a store.  All of my retail sites have more content pages than retail pages.  Sometimes that content is perfectly related one-on-one to to retail products, sometimes it is tangentially related, and sometimes it is kinda loosely related, but all of that content brings people in and some of those people buy and some of those people engage with the adsense that I have on the content pages.

Lots of people type my domains into search engines, not because they want to buy something on my site but because they want to read something on my site.  Google sees these people asking for my sites by name.

If anyone should be worried about you offering content on a product site it should be your competitors.

It does not bother me to see disagreement on how to SEO a page or a website.  That gives the person with the best BS filter an advantage over everyone else.  It also makes the person who stops, thinks, and researches an additional advantage over everyone else.

I believe that most SEO advice posted on the web is bad advice, including a lot of the advice that I give.  Again, it comes back to giving the person with the best BS filter a huge advantage.

So, when I read this article my BS meter goes off here....

While I can understand that preaching “build good content, focus on growing your brand’ sounds great and it’s what people want to hear, for a HUGE percentage of search phrases, this is just no longer relevant....   I just can’t take anyone seriously who mentions these things anymore in 2013,

.... and the rest of the article doesn't make much sense to me.  But, since I think that about 95% of SEO is based upon good great content, it doesn't surprise me that I don't "get" the rest of the article.

Here are things that can ruin your rankings if done poorly...

1. changing your on-page optimization - this includes titles h1 h2 etc.

2. changing your URLs and not doing a redirect

3. changing your file/folder names in a way that makes them less relevant

4. changing your internal navigation in a way that reroutes linkjuice

5. using code that prevents spidering of internal links

Not directly related to SEO but still important

6. changing your page layout that obscures navigation, links to related items, access to important pages - these can increase your bounce rate

7. design changes that reduce mind-on-task in ways that kill your conversion rate

When you do a redesign you should not be fearing the loss of rankings.  Instead this is the time to do an SEO evaluation as part of the redesign.  This is an opportunity to move your rankings UP.

If you want good responses to this question, then post more about these pages (current content, how many, current traffic, current rankings, recent problems, purpose of pages, etc.) and more about your site (current content, how many, current traffic, current rankings, recent problems, etc.).

Questions with little information are often ignored by people who might know a lot about the  subject because they don't want to guess, they don't want to think about and write about all possible cases, put their effort into a question when the poster didn't put much of his own effort into explaining.

Also, who are you?  Owner?  Employee?  SEO?  Are you the guy who put these pages up and didn't put any content on them?  The guy who paid for the skinny content that is currently up there and needs to have input on yanking them down or paying for proper content?

My client purchased over 500 URLs...

OMG!   I would allow at least 400 of them to expire and buy beer with the savings. 

It's impossible for you to take the time and effort on each domain, so the entire campaign will suffer. Instead focus on a single domain, and build that up to cover the areas you want to.

I am in complete agreement with William.  I would work on one site and only use a second domain when my main site was killing the SERPs for a specific topic area (not a keyword - a whole topic area).

Allows high ranking sites to show users who the provider is, potentially creating a new client, and a followed incoming link on anchor text you can choose.

My answer on this has nothing to do with SEO.

It has to do with where I believe the role of a service provider is supposed to begin and end.

I personally think that SEOs linking back to their own sites from a client site is low form.  The SEO is supposed to be helping the client not siphoning his power.   You could accomplish that visibility by simply having your name on the site in unlinked text.  Adding a link is unnecessary and greedy.

When I see those links on other sites, I do find it to be useful information.  I know who I would not hire.

Honestly, if an SEO or designer or hosting provider wanted to put a link on my site I would tell him "no" nicely.  If they  argued or pressed for it my consideration of his company would be concluded.  The link is not necessary for attribution.

If an SEO or hosting company wanted to have their name at the bottom of my site without the link I would tell them how much it would cost to advertise there.  The value of that advertising would probably exceed the value of the service that they provided.

If you go to a big brand site such as CNN, WSJ, Today, ESPN, you don't see links to SEOs, hosting or designers.  They are not being billboards for their service providers.

My displeasure on this is extremely strong against SEOs  and hosting providers.   For designers I can understand why they ask.  For a designer, if I am exceedingly pleased with what they have done I might list them on the "about us" page, where I mention a few people who have contributed to the content of the site.  Why the designer?  Because they improved what people see and that includes matching the design to my content or complimenting it.

I have different views when it comes to photographs, graphics, videos.  I always name the creator of those content assets and often link to their website in the caption.   Why?  Because they are a content source and my visitors might want to see more of their work.  It is similar to a reference link on a Wikipedia article.  Those links are useful to the visitors.   Even if I paid them a license fee, I  mention them and usually link to them (the only exception is with a thumbnail, but that thumbnail always links to an article where their photo is prominent and with attribution and usually a link).   I give them attribution because I want to help them.  They usually have sites that are less visible than mine.  And I want them to feel that the got back more than they gave.

My site is not about SEO or about hosting or design.  So a link to those sites is not useful to my visitor, so it really should not be there.

Product A exists for years and nobody is sayin' anything about it.  Then, BAM, a ton of crappy reviews appear on a bunch of crappy sites..... Somebody did somethin' to make that happen - especially when those reviews appear on sites that do not make a practice of reviewing products.   Engineers not required.

A short product description on my sites is about 100 words and a unique photo with a generous caption - so about 150 words total.

Most products get a much longer description of at least 300 to 500 words and at least one unique photo.  The short description described above is often upgraded after we receive a few questions about a product or after we get more experience using the product ourselves (we have experience using almost every product that we sell).  When the descriptions are improved, the rankings often go up and the page starts pulling in traffic for long tail keywords.  These are the two benefits that we see from improving product descriptions.

Better selling products and those that receive lots of questions can have even longer descriptions of 500 to 1000 words and more photos.  Best selling products also usually have separate articles that explain how to select the product, how to use them, how to maintain/repair and more.  We always have links to these articles within product descriptions.  Our product pages and article pages often rank #1 and #2 in the SERPs.  We also have lots of #1, #2, #3 positions as a result of our article pages.

These really long descriptions usually have the essential info in the first one or two paragraphs.  Information after that has subheading to make it easy for shoppers to scan and skip/read parts of the description that they want.

If we have a product that gets a few returns we often add information about the product that caused people to return it.  We would rather kill a few sales than incur costly returns.

Lots of people think... "I'll build fifty-five sites to kickass on my competitor because it will give me a shitload of backlinks."

Those backlinks are worth nothing.  You can't manufacture links.  Google is too smart for that.

They would be better off building a giant site that dominates the niche and THEN building satellite sites and powering them with links from the giant site.

W3C Validation: How Important is This to Ranking?

It depends who you ask.

If you ask one of the W3C evangelists they will tell you that you will never get good rankings without it and that google will penalize your website and not allow it to be seen in certain countries.

If you ask people who really know about this stuff they will tell you that if your site renders well in most browsers you will do fine in search.