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I've never understood why recipe blogs have so much extra text, unless it's an SEO thing to start with. The text all feels useless fluff to me anyway; all I'm t

by thaeli 6y ago

I've never understood why recipe blogs have so much extra text, unless it's an SEO thing to start with. The text all feels useless fluff to me anyway; all I'm there for is the actual recipe card itself. And from a user's perspective, it's impossible to tell the difference between the original and a "counterfeit", both are full of borderline malware ads, too much scrolling, and infuriating modal popups wanting my email address. I don't want your newsletter. I don't want your life story. I don't want intrusive ads. I just want the (functional, non-copyrightable) recipe itself. /rant

wodenokoto 6y ago
It’s an SEO thing.
watwut 6y ago
It is google algorithm. It pushes doen pure receipts in result, so they add fluff to go up in search. The text is useless fluff. They gotta have something that looks like ranking worthy text to google and takes as little effort as possible (since humans will skip it).
maccard 6y ago
Most of the "decent" blog recipe sites have a "jump-to-recipe" button at the top.
klyrs 6y ago
> I just want the (functional, non-copyrightable) recipe itself. There's the rub. You can copyright your story. It's easy to scrape recipes from webpages. It's harder to translate a story into a recipe. If you post a plain & simple recipe to the internet, it will be copied and folks (and the bots behind search engines) won't have a clear incentive to visit/link your recipe over the numerous copies. If you've got a clear copyright violation, there's a chance you can get the copies taken down, or at least hidden by search engines. If it's just the functional, non-copyrightable recipe itself, no such luck. And then, with all the expense of creating and hosting the content, plus fighting the deluge of spammers, how do you monetize? The easy way: the borderline malware ads, modal popups, dickbars, etc. Blech. I'm with you, it sucks. But it's not just "an SEO thing"; it's also a case study on how "information wants to be free" meets the gritty reality of the internet economy.
akiselev 6y ago
Google tracks your behavior during searches so the longer it takes you to press the back button to return to the results, the higher that page scores. All the recipe sites seem to have figured out that score weighs heavily in Google's rankings.
arp242 6y ago
I worked on a better recipe site/product last year out of frustration with the existing options. I also wanted something I could earn some money with though, and doing that with a recipe website is rather tricky without resorting to this sort of bullshit, so I ended up shelving it for the time being (I still want to finish it at some point though, as it has some nice ideas IMO). I could use a subscription model, I suppose, but I'm less than confident this will actually succeed. There's so much free content out there and I found that a lot of people are willing to jump through all sorts of hoops to avoid paying.
wyclif 6y ago
This is why I never use recipe blogs, they're garbage. I recommend this instead: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/

by thaeli 6y ago

wodenokoto 6y ago

It’s an SEO thing.

watwut 6y ago

It is google algorithm. It pushes doen pure receipts in result, so they add fluff to go up in search. The text is useless fluff. They gotta have something that looks like ranking worthy text to google and takes as little effort as possible (since humans will skip it).

maccard 6y ago

Most of the "decent" blog recipe sites have a "jump-to-recipe" button at the top.

klyrs 6y ago

> I just want the (functional, non-copyrightable) recipe itself. There's the rub. You can copyright your story. It's easy to scrape recipes from webpages. It's harder to translate a story into a recipe. If you post a plain & simple recipe to the internet, it will be copied and folks (and the bots behind search engines) won't have a clear incentive to visit/link your recipe over the numerous copies. If you've got a clear copyright violation, there's a chance you can get the copies taken down, or at least hidden by search engines. If it's just the functional, non-copyrightable recipe itself, no such luck. And then, with all the expense of creating and hosting the content, plus fighting the deluge of spammers, how do you monetize? The easy way: the borderline malware ads, modal popups, dickbars, etc. Blech. I'm with you, it sucks. But it's not just "an SEO thing"; it's also a case study on how "information wants to be free" meets the gritty reality of the internet economy.

akiselev 6y ago

Google tracks your behavior during searches so the longer it takes you to press the back button to return to the results, the higher that page scores. All the recipe sites seem to have figured out that score weighs heavily in Google's rankings.

arp242 6y ago

I worked on a better recipe site/product last year out of frustration with the existing options. I also wanted something I could earn some money with though, and doing that with a recipe website is rather tricky without resorting to this sort of bullshit, so I ended up shelving it for the time being (I still want to finish it at some point though, as it has some nice ideas IMO). I could use a subscription model, I suppose, but I'm less than confident this will actually succeed. There's so much free content out there and I found that a lot of people are willing to jump through all sorts of hoops to avoid paying.

wyclif 6y ago

This is why I never use recipe blogs, they're garbage. I recommend this instead: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/