[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.

[calgoo]

When it looks and acts like the spam sites, then what difference is there really? If I have to scroll 4 pages to find the ingredients and then scroll around like crazy to find the instructions (then scroll back and forth while cooking/baking) then it does not matter how good the recipe is, the page killed it for me.

[albumen]

I'd argue that most web users have a higher tolerance for ads than HN users, so they put up with the scrolling. And if it results in a tasty recipe, then they'll do it next time too, since that's seemingly the (tolerable) price to be paid for good food.

But lots of recipe sites now have a "jump to recipe" link at the top, so they've realised the junk is annoying for some fraction of their users. Although page junk is a pain, shortcuts for low-tolerance users seems like a good compromise.

[jopsen]

Nobody forces you to put ads on anything.

The idea that every website or tool with lots of visitors should be monetized is sad.

Original author made a tool, why do you have to make money on it?

Perhaps it sad that websites without ads aren't ranked higher.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Because websites aren't free to build or run. No one is obligated to put ads on their site, sure. They're also not obligated to work for many hours to provide you with free content or pay $X/no to serve it to you.

[CM30]

The thing is, even if you don't put ads on a page or tool, Google will sometimes not index it because it doesn't think there's 'enough' content, no matter how little sense that makes. At least half the issues with recipe sites and company sites come from them trying to get a site that doesn't need reems of text content indexed by a search engine that seems to blindly value the quantity of content and time spent on the page over all else.

[watwut]

The people who have bad content are the ones to get money, while those who have good content are not. Logical result is that people with good content stop producing that content while the people with bad content continue producing it and being rewarded for it.

[squidbeak]

An earnest writer and spammer might reach the same method in different ways, but the result is still blogspam.