It's a running joke in our house. I start off wanting to make some mashed potatoes, and time and time again, I have to suffer through someone's life story--the camping trip in North Dakota when Susan's husband first discovered his love of homemade sour cream--etc. Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards.
“Why doesn’t everyone who is putting information out there for free not cater to exactly my needs”.
What an utter load of bollocks. These are people who are creating something that they enjoy doing and giving you information you apparently need for free. I don’t understand why anyone would trash their desire to write something that is personal and/or interesting to them about it.
And that’s setting aside that these usually make the recipes far more readable and interesting to the vast majority of people.
It's a sweet world view, but the truth is that the majority of these cooking sites are filling in content for SEO and ad purposes, and the "stories" are fictions written by Tom, a 22 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is just trying to make ends meet at 3¢/word.
Tom, a 22 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is just trying to make ends meet at 3¢/word.
Or Doreen, a 54 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is trying to make ends meet at something under 3¢/word.
I haven't actually written for the site in question. I'm not trying to imply that I have. More like saying "Yeah, this is absolutely a thing."
And it's a thing in part because my actual original blogging that's the real deal doesn't get enough tips and Patreon supporters. If people want to see less content marketing to get ad revenue and more quality writing aimed at providing something fresh, they should be looking for independent authors to support whose writing they actually like.
I was providing original content written entirely by me for years before I began doing freelance writing. I would have likely never become a freelance writer if people had been willing to leave tips, promote my writing, engage with me so I would have a better idea of what to provide for my audience and so forth.
If you don't like what's on the internet, go "look in the mirror" so to speak. I've been on Hacker News nearly 11 years and was literally homeless for nearly six of that while people around here told me "Go get a real job. Writing doesn't pay. Your expectation that your writing should be capable of providing a living wage is just silly talk."
It's not so-called market forces at work. It's human choice and those choices are rooted in what we value and all this. If this world isn't the world folks want to see, they can make other choices more in line with what they claim they want instead of "being traffic" while complaining about it.
(Edit: For the record: Most of my freelance writing is content for small business sites and I don't feel the tiniest bit of regret. I like working for a paid service and I blog about that too and get accused of the site being content marketing when it absolutely isn't. http://writepay.blogspot.com/)
They're being rightly trashed because it's a SEO tactic and nothing more. Between the preamble ranking them higher and Adsense requiring "substance" in order to monetise the page, there is a systematic issue that's leading to what is essentially useless information to what I would say is the majority of people.
They're very welcome to write their life story, but I bet if google changed their algorithm slightly you'd see it disappear - and I'd say that would be a good thing.
HNers writhing over each other to be the most cynical and dismissive.
For fun, can you link me to a highly ranked recipe page with a bullshit SEO story on it in line with "the camping trip in North Dakota when Susan's husband first discovered his love of homemade sour cream"?
But just to prove your point and make you happy, and also because I'm hungry, I googled "sushi recipe idea" and clicked the first link that, without fail, talks about the very special valentine's day Tom^Wthe author and her husband spent years ago and how sushi is now a tradition.
You have to scroll halfway down to get your ingredients list after learning that her husband is a vegetarian, getting a history of the author cooking mostly plants before anyway, getting a lesson on what egg noodles are and, finally, the ingredients.
"When I woke up that Sunday morning, it was a crisp 68°. I opened every window in the house (the first time we’d aired it out since April) and put on a pair of jeans and a light long-sleeved shirt. While Scott was busy appraising his fantasy football rosters, I was searing beef and taking pictures."
> What an utter load of bollocks. These are people who are creating something that they enjoy doing and giving you information you apparently need for free. I don’t understand why anyone would trash their desire to write something that is personal and/or interesting to them about it.
They're mostly copying recipes from other places then applying SEO. That's it. The ridiculous probably-made-up stories are for SEO.
It's not about trashing someone for doing something they love. It's about a prescribed format for food blogs that has all but taken over anything food related on the internet. I highly doubt it's a coincidence that thousands of food bloggers adapted a "five pages about me and then the recipe" template for their writing. As others are saying, it's an SEO tactic, and it's probably annoying to the bloggers too.
There's no arguing about it making recipes more "readable" when you have to scan down page after page to get to the actual ingredient list. That's super annoying. To put it into perspective, if the recipe was at the top, and the blogger wanted to spend five chapters talking about their life afterwards, more power to them, I wouldn't care a bit.
Or maybe, people are just fed up with the 'fluff'. I know I am. I don't need or want a 10 minute lead in to a news story that finally explains the issue. I don't have time to sift through drivel to get the information I am after. This isn't academic research project. And frankly, I don't give two shits about ANY of the blog spam fluff. When I'm looking for a recipe, I want the technicals of 'how to make this', and that's it.
I see this as more a problem of the web, than the recipe sites themselves. More and more often, web sites are shoving information down your eyeballs to keep you on the page longer. I hate this trend. I want the service or information to give me what I want, and get out of my way. Google search? Get me what I want, and get out of the way. Email inbox? Same deal. Yet the exact opposite is happening with more and more invasive time wasting drivel, being injected everywhere.
Having thought about this and my own use of cookbooks as loose inspiration rather than actually to follow in detail, I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want. In particular, the fluff has value even if you never cook the recipe! Which saves a lot of time and inconvenience on your part while still giving the same warm fluffy feelings.
Actual "I have these things and want to cook something" could practically be automated.
The big exception is baking, where precision ratios and time matters a lot.
(I'm also reminded of various stories of people trying to trace the origins of much loved family recipes and then discovering that rather than being an authentic traditional Calabrian whatever, their grandmother copied it off the back of a tin. I'm fairly sure my own grandmother's cookies recipe is from Tate&Lyle)
I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want.
I've often heard the prevailing reason why this happens on the web is because of SEO and 'bounce rates'. More time spent on the site improves ranking, so the actual recipe is pushed below the fold so users have to scroll down thereby adding more time on the site.
Have often wondered if any SEO wonks with the inside baseball can actually validate this?
I've also read that it's to do with copyright - the recipes themselves can't be copyrighted, but the text around them can. Scraper republishes your ingredients list: not a lot you can do. Scraper republishes your fluffy anecdote and pictures: BLAMMO!
Except the whole reason this article on scraping recipe sites was written was to ignore the fluff. Forcing copyright this way doesn't sound particularly helpful when the fluffy anecdote has so little value in comparison to the recipe. Or is it really the case that the average reader wants the anecode secondary to the recipe?
It feels like people are trying to make money around information that is fundamentally impractical to make money off of, so they're forced into doing whatever it takes to make money off of it anyway. "Whatever it takes" is defined by Google yet ruins the user experience, and so that is why recipe sites are this way.
I mostly like the pre-recipe text on Smitten Kitchen.
Sometimes it's a little rambling, but there's often useful information about the recipe that follows, like shortcuts that seem like they should work, but don't. She includes some interesting links or background, and getting a bite-sized glimpse of someone else's life isn't the worst thing.
I can't validate this but have been told this by multiple authors and SEO professionals. So it's anecdotal. One blogger apologized to me and told me she was embarrassed doing it but it's an industry practice. She explained it's because other recipe sites use automated scraping tools and republish their recipes in an effort to outrank original authors. The personal fluff helps slow them down. Also, a lot of recipes are bullshit, they manually steal them from elsewhere and change a few variables to evade copyright claims. Although, I guess changing a few variables is how cuisines evolve.
Photographs, videos, or drawings of recipes in progress are copyrightable, and usually more helpful. Furthermore, they provide evidence that the recipe is actually viable.
That's why you shouldn't expect to make a cent from creating a new recipe, unless you have a chef and photographer/artist lined up, or own your own restaurant chain.
Thanks. This makes sense. I was wondering what these fluff pieces have to do with SEO, because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results.
Bounce rates and how long a visitor stays on a page matter for those who own the sites and/or do some sort of marketing on them (ads, their own products, their services, etc.).
because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results.
Probably not the search engines, but I could imagine this being a thing that goes into Google Analytics if an online recipe property is using that (or if their blogging platform has a plugin for it) maybe? Just spitballing from the hip.
Yes, search engines monitor result clicks, bounce rates, dwell times, etc. They do affect ranking. And if you have Google analytics on your recipe site, Google has even more data about it.
I think they specifically mentioned it does not affect it, someone asked that question in a webinar. If it would affect it, than it could be abused (eg. just send 10k bots that spend 1 hour on the site), plus a longer session doesn't necessarily mean a better site or better user experience. Google itself is a good example, where the point of Google is to spend as little time as possible on their page, as it's just a step between the user and his destination.
I have done lot of work on cocktails (major brand) and they key is the structured mark-up we are trying some tests on longer form listings ie >200 words.
I think that food is much more dispersed apart from super stars like Nigella, Jamie and the BBC so its harder for the average food blogger.
Also don't discount the target audience for these pages might not be the average developer / nh reader.
Also don't discount the
Some of the best stories too have bits of the art inside of the food science anecdotes that contribute to a sense of why a particular variation on a recipe worked better for the author. Some authors have more of a sweet tooth, and others live in higher altitudes or tweak their recipes for camp stoves on hiking trips up the mountains. Some authors spend days and weeks of failures trying to get a proper balance of flour to baking soda/baking powder for just the exact sort of yeast rise they want from their dough, and others just wing it let the dough live or crumble as nature intends as it adds a little chaos to the whimsy and art of their eventual plating.
It's also the little touches of humanity that people want if they want to follow a particular food blogger. The anecdotes add up over time to a sense of following a workplace or family sitcom to follow week to week (whether they make the recipes or not). It's a daily or weekly "soap opera" ("flour opera"?) of an acquaintance or "friend" that you also like to crib recipes from from time to time.
Where these recipe bloggers have their steadiest audiences, those stories at the top of the recipe are the real draw day-to-day, and the recipes the fun addendum to bookmark for later.
I read long ago that you can/should always trust recipes printed on manufacturer's packages; after all, they've chosen them to stake their ingredients' reputations on.
> Add far more butter than anyone would think is reasonable. (Like, 1/2lb of butter to 1lb of potatoes. Maybe more.)
No. The butter gets lost in the potatoes and mouthfeel of the fat is compromised. That is the reason that so much is needed if you do it this way. Much better to only add it right when serving, leaving the butter and potatoes largely unmixed. Preferably added in an amount “to-taste” by the individual. I believe this was covered by McGee’s “On Food and Cooking”, but I may be misremembering.
I would buy a cooking book with recipes explained like this one. With real world tricks and explaining "why" you do it in that way. A raw list of ingredients is, in my opinion, almost useless.
America’s Test Kitchen (TV) / Cooks Illustrated (books) will scratch your itch.
My foodie friend and I use a lot of their recipes.
The cool thing is that sometimes you will disagree with their preferences (totally normal), so you can use one of their variants that has the attributes that you want. Or similarly, you can see how changing certain ingredients changes the outcome and personalize your version of the recipe accordingly. It definitely saves some experimental batches.
I’ve found that The New Best Recipe cookbook covers this pretty well for me. They have an introduction to each recipe talking about all the variants they tried, and then there’s a clearly marked recipe section.
Alternatively, if you want super barebones, go buy a copy of Escoffier's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire (or an English translation thereof). It's arguably the definitive cookbook and the recipes are extremely terse, some just a couple of lines long. (e.g. "Take recipe A and recipe B, substituting X for Y.")
"Escoffier's introduction to the first edition explains his intention that Le Guide culinaire be used toward the education of the younger generation of cooks. This usage of the book still holds today; many culinary schools still use it as their culinary textbook. Its style is to give recipes as brief descriptions and to assume that the reader either knows or can look up the keywords in the description."
Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards.
There are apps like that, at least. I use How to Cook Everything. It's from Mark Bittman, who was with the New York Times at the time it was published. I don't know if he is anymore.
> Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally
just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something
people would gravitate towards
In German there's chefkoch.de. It's full of ads but its core is basically a
big DB of user-submitted recipes without fluff. Don't you have
something like that in English?
I usually add "BBC" to my search term, which ① gets a straightforward page and ② ensures the measurements and oven temperatures will be metric.
The further from the UK one is, the less useful this is. The measurements should only be a problem in the US and Canada, but common ingredients can change -- e.g. the fat content of cream, or whether canned tomatoes are salted or sweetened. Also, if you're from the rest of the world, you might wonder why they've forgotten the herbs and spices :-)
I mean in Google search, or any other general web search.
It's probably less necessary from the UK, but from Denmark an English-language recipe search has a good chance of giving American websites. Americans have to suffer sugary and salty canned tomatoes.
