One of my favorite parts of my job involves hypothesizing about which types or genres of content might be copied frequently and then testing my theories live.

Diving into recipe copying felt very natural for me – I am an aspiring chef who has taken more amateur cooking classes than I’d like to admit. I love to try out new recipes on my unsuspecting family and—unlike my mother’s generation—don’t have to pore through unwieldy, batter-splattered cookbooks to find a new way to make chicken.

As it turns out, many of the recipes I find online are copies. Jennifer Guevin of CNET wrote an in-depth piece on our study of recipe duplication online, but here are the highlights.

What we did:

• Loaded 37,000 publicly available recipes from Epicurious.com, Allrecipes.com and RachelRaymag.com
• Let Attributor scan for matches or copies of the recipes.
• Reviewed the matches and used Attributor’s % copied sorting feature to eliminate those that seemed to be derivatives, rather than copies of the original.
• Took a random sampling of the recipes and plugged the recipe titles into Google search.

What we found:

• Over 10,000 copies of the recipes were spread over 3,000 different sites.
• Most were almost word-for-word copies. Across all matches, the average % copied was over 70%.
• 57% of the sites with copied recipes had ads on their pages.
• 60% of the sites with copied recipes failed to link back to the original recipe site.
• For over 50% of the recipes we put into Google search, the copied recipe had a higher search rank than the original.

What it means:

Recipe Sites are definitely losing out on traffic. Using a conservative methodology that excludes the search engine impact of copies outranking the original, we estimate recipe sites are losing ~13% of their monthly traffic to recipe copying.

Will the recipe sites want to send DMCA Takedown notices to the 3,000 sites copying their content? Probably not.

Might they want to request each copying site to link back to their original recipe site? I think so, especially when the recipe sites realize the impact these links would have on their search engine rankings. Links are a critical part of search engine rankings, and anyone who publishes original content needs to understand it.