Would Google penalize me for my recipe site?

It is a vegan/vegetarian site, so I copy most of the recipes. I add different tags like H2 throughout it, but it is copied recipes.

I also interested in this. Sometimes with niches like this its hard to write "unique" content as you cant really re write the info too much

http://microformats.org/wiki/recipe-examples

if you do that, you won't.

SirKonstantine:

You are saying I should link to the actual site that is hosting the recipes?

Must be easy enough to make slight changes to recipes i.e 200g of floor instead 180g and a few other small changes per recipe. Also change the recipe name if it is very specific something like "Aunt Terrys creole ribs" you would change to "Creole rib roast" for example

I've got a 12 year old site with recipes (including vegetarian and vegan) and have had the daylights scrapped out of it - and I don't appreciate it. It's hurt me terribly because no one credits the source any more. And, it is humanely impossible to keep up with finding all the scraped content.

But the one good thing about recipes is that they're very difficult to claim any copyright on. Like someone said, alter them a bit - but remember that people may really try them; they should turn out good results. This would mean testing any alterations you make, which could be a job in itself.