[arfar]

Oh gosh those are the worst. And they never look good on your phone, so you have to get your laptop out (or tablet if you have one).

If it's not a pointless blog/article header, then the ingredients and method are split up across "tabs". So that now, when it says "melt the butter and whisk in half the flour", you need to flick back and forward multiple times for each step to remember what to do and how much to add.

[shostack]

My kingdom for a browser plugin that automatically identifies a recipe site and strips out everything except the actual recipe. Reader mode comes close, but you still have to scroll through all the crap (assuming the recipe is all on one page).

What gets me though is why Google suddenly felt the need to rank these sites over more established recipe sites that literally just gave you the recipe. I've been in digital marketing a long time and seen a few "waves" of major SEO updates come and go. When there seems to be a significant shift in quality for a category of results, Google does tend to eventually take action. So I wonder if we're going to see a correction at some point that stops favoring those sorts of aggregator blog posts and "long-form recipes."

The content being created is not valuable, and is clearly being done solely for rankings at this point.

If any Googlers are reading this, I'd love any additional insight as to why these sites continue to do well.

[fancy_pantser]

I've also wanted such an extension so after reading this comment I was finally spurred into action.

It works on a few sites I know are popular plus any that use the standard div with "itemtype" set to "http[s]://schema.org/Recipe", which seems to handle about 85% of the long-winded blogs out there. It extracts the recipe div and displays it nicely at the top of the page, dimming the site behind it. It has a button at the bottom of the recipe to dismiss the popup. Most sites include a handy print link or button at the top as well so you can quickly click through to that formatting as well (i.e. if you actually print recipes or use the Paprika recipe manager bookmarklet).

You can install the CRX directly: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter/m...

I will work on it some more to have proper controls, icon, work on more sites, etc then get it into the Chrome Web Store for easy installation.

Thanks for the final push!

[shostack]

Wow, nice work! Please circle back here and let me know once it is officially in the store, would love to check it out and spread the word!

Honestly, this is the sort of thing that once Amazon adds a Whole Foods API for ordering, you could add an unobtrusive "order these ingredients for pickup at Whole Foods" link or something at the bottom and hopefully make some commission off of it.

Ping me when it's built and I'll help you promote it if you're interested (I'm a marketer).

[dhruvkar]

they're often heavily promoted/shared - social signals seem to weigh heavily these days for SEO.

I have a clean site in a related space (https://keto.fm) and multiple subscribers have commented along the lines of: "this looked like a spam site, but once we browsed through it, it had rrally good content!"