Hi Roni, I am a long time reader of yours! I love your recipes and your ideas. You have helped to inspire me in my weight loss journey. I started a blog just posting some of my favorite recipes. I wanted to know what the proper protocol is for posting a recipe from someone else’s website/blog? If you give full credit to the source do you still need to contact them for permission? Just didn’t find any clear answers while I was searching for the answer and hoped you could help me out.

Thank you Roni!
Emme of givintheskinny.blogspot.com

Hi Emme!

This is a great question. I’m not sure I have an "official" answer but I’ll give you my philosophy. I normally try to always give a fellow blogger a heads up if I’m linking to them, recipe or not. It’s may be an informal tweet or a private email but I do my best even though it’s not a requirement. The web is public and if they’ve made their content public you have every right to link to it. You can’t steal it but link away!

As for the credit itself, if I just made the the recipe and I’m simply posting a picture of it, I’ll link back to the original recipe on the fellow bloggers blog without republishing the content. If I’ve modified the recipe in some way I’ll provide my new recipe with a link to the original recipe that says something like "modified from blah blah" or I may even do it more informally. Like within the chatter of the post like, "I stumbled across this recipe from blah blah and it inspired me today." Either way is fine as long as you credit them.

Overall, there is no definitive way to do it. Just always make an effort to give them a heads up, give credit where credit is due and you’ll be fine. Oh! and by all means, make the text a physical like back to the original recipe. I’ve had so many people mention that I’ve inspired them but they don’t actually link back to my original recipe, they just mention it in text. In my opinion, that goes against the whole concept of the web. Spread the Link Love people! :)

Hope that helps and thanks for reading! :)
-Roni