What this is

Help Me Cook Food searches 19,815 recipes from 197 small, independent sites that big search engines tend to bury. Nothing here is a paid placement.

What gets in

• The site shows recipes and looks like a person made it: first-person writing, a family name, a hand-run blog.
• No heavy ad networks (Mediavine, Raptive, Ezoic, AdSense and similar) on the homepage or any recipe page. If one turns up later, the whole site is dropped.
• Big recipe brands and magazines are left out. Restaurants and shops are left out.
• A page is indexed only if it is a real recipe: recipe markup, or an ingredients list and method.
• Free WordPress.com blogs sometimes carry one ad that WordPress adds itself. We allow those.

How sites are found

A crawler starts from hand-picked sites and blog directories, then follows the links those sites make to each other: blogrolls, link pages, webrings. Every site is checked against the rules above before any page is indexed.

For site owners

The crawler is NicheSearchBot. It honours robots.txt and its Crawl-delay, fetches one page at a time with a pause between, and re-checks about once a month. To keep your site out:

User-agent: NicheSearchBot
Disallow: /

Suggest a site

Know a site that belongs here? It will be checked against the rules on the next crawl.

Suggest