[oakashes]

It's a fair point about how awful recipe sites look without ad blockers, but this part is just plain incorrect:

> You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam.

At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third. But Google seems to have actually done a good job of highlighting recipes from reliable blogs.

The points about the compromised experience on those sites due to intrusive ads remain.

[tonyarkles]

I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter.

The recipe looks good (chickpeas, olive oil, salt, spices, oh shit I stole her blog post). I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam".

[throwup238]

The problem is that Google started weighing time spent on page very heavily in their ranking algorithm - I don't remember at what point this happened but it must be about a decade ago by now. Every time a user clicks a Google result without using "Open in New Tab" and clicks the back button, Google gets a signal about how long they spent on the page. The longer a user spends on the site, the stronger the signal. Once all the SEO vampires figured it out, everyone started to pile on prologues to all their content, not just recipe sites. In my experience that was the beginning of the end.

Any recipe site that survived had to adopt the tactic or die, leaving only the spammers and the odd outlier with actual content to write about like Serious Eats. Same thing happened to Youtube and their preview photos; even the legit content creators had to start making those stupid bug eye images.

[devsda]

The first site "cookieandkate" might look like blogspam but it wasn't.

After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites.

[1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel.

[2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content.

Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda.

[1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandk...

[2]. https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandk...

[fancy_pantser]

I got so fed up with this that I made a browser extension for it. It's in the Chrome Web Store and Firefox as well, but you'll have to build the xcode project in the Safari directory if that's your preferred browser.

https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter

[Lazare]

That's not entirely fair.

The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.

[itsoktocry]

>I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam".

This is a strange complaint. You're visiting the blog of a woman who writes about cooking. Can't speak to the ads (I block them), but her site looks pretty good. Why do you think she should list her recipe like some kind of index? Perhaps she blogs for her own enjoyment, not for yours?

Have you ever read popular cook books? They aren't simply listings of ingredients, either.

[mitemte]

I generally use https://www.taste.com.au. No bullshit prologue about how a distant relative used to make the recipe in question. Just and overview, photo ingredients and steps. Everything else is secondary and usually worthless.

[barbariangrunge]

I laughed out loud at this. You haven’t looked up many recipes in the last few years, have you? 95% of recipe results are nonsense and ads. It can take a few minutes of searching just to identify ingredients sometimes. My wife and I have been improvising recipes lately to avoid digging through all the junk. I actually recommend this: you can sort of make stuff up based on prior experience and things turn out pretty well sometimes.

Or, put your simplified recipes in a binder near the kitchen

Anything to avoid going to google to find a recipe