4 ms·

AFAIK the 2000 word essays in recipes are Google's fault - it prioritizes pages with a lot of content, so you have to add that junk to the top in order to rank

AFAIK the 2000 word essays in recipes are Google's fault - it prioritizes pages with a lot of content, so you have to add that junk to the top in order to rank highly. While I'm sure there's more going on behind the scenes than I'm aware of, it does seem like the rules could be altered on a category-specific basis where a lot of text isn't necessarily a positive.

behnamoh 5y ago
Years ago I wanted to pursue micro blogging, but this "feature" of Google search stopped me from doing it. What's the point of writing succinct, to-the-point mini articles about problems and solutions if nobody finds them on Google?
- skilled 5y ago
  This is largely because micro-blogging means less content, and less content means you could write five 300-word blog posts instead of one 1,500-word post. I've done blogging for the last 10+ years, and many of those I spent as a freelancer working with startups/brands/editorials. Everyone is after "word count" and I absolutely hate it. Whenever I work on articles for my own blog, I just don't consider word-count at all. I think if your content is great and informative, then readership will be natural.
  - vntok 5y ago
    This is a very interesting approach. Do you have traffic data collection on your blog?
    - skilled 5y ago
      I collect post views, but not using Google Analytics or anything like that. I built a pretty substantial developer blog (tips, resources, etc,.) back in 2014. I think it peaked at around 350,000 monthly visitors after 12 months. Later on, I sold it because I needed the money. Not so much that I didn't want to keep working on it. Unfortunately, the new owners didn't have any idea how to maintain a "healthy" content blog, and it has plummeted down to around 30,000 monthly visitors. All the content they're publishing now is some thin headline-clickbait bullshit. I even gave them free advice on how to fix it, but I think that for a lot of people, they just don't care and will mindlessly pump out as many pieces of content as possible. And such blogs can be identified from a mile away. And therein lies the problem with Google SEO at the moment. Even myself, someone who has done SEO work for more than a decade, I can see that results are getting worse. In some niches, the same crappy articles that dominated 6-7 years ago are still dominant today. I guess we're stuck in time, or so Google thinks.
      - behnamoh 5y ago
        Could it also be due to reduction of public interest in blogs over the past few years? Most stuff are now published in the form of vlogs instead of blogs. I do miss the good old blogs era, tho, and I wish there were still high quality blogs around.
throwawayboise 5y ago
It's two-fold. If Google priortizes pages with a lot of content that's one thing, but longer content also means more space for ads, or more scroll events to trigger ads, etc. Incidentally, prioritizing long content seems odd to me, in my experience the best pages are short and get right to the point, at least in the context of something like a recipe or other "how to" resources.
wakiza33 5y ago
prioritizes is correct, but in some ways it's not the best descriptor. Google's algos, while advanced, still rely a ton on text to actually tell what the page is about. They need it. If they just relied on other factors (title, links, website, etc.) they would end up with worse results for users. Im sure they've tested it. Google's core algo in a lot of ways is much simpler than people think (in other ways of course it's very complex).
UncleMeat 5y ago
This one is hard because it does actually seem to be the case that the cruft around the recipe is valuable if the content is right. Most of the recipe blog stuff is garbage, but if you look at youtube it is clear that creators who add extra flair around the recipe are a powerful force.
kevinmchugh 5y ago
Recipe intro text is useful for contextualizing the recipe and copyright purposes. In RSS days, it was a way to get readers to click through, so the author got the ad views. Also people who write recipes like to write about food.
- awillen 5y ago
  I'd say it can be useful, but that's not often the case (especially not to the tune of 1000+ words).
dredmorbius 5y ago
This reminds me of the page inflation that struck tech books during the late 1990s / early aughts. The Marketing Wisdom was that fat books sold (or took up more shelf space), so texts got padded with weak writing, gratuitous puffery, and other elements, which (much as the recipie essays) simply got in the way of delivering actual informative content. (The fact that many of these books were rushed out with very poor quality control also didn't help.)
sct202 5y ago
While I think the essays are excessive, I appreciate that some of them document that the blogger actually made the recipe with progress pictures. With the more basic recipes websites, I wonder if anyone's actually made it before or if the recipe is from some scrapped database of unknown origin and quality.

behnamoh 5y ago

Years ago I wanted to pursue micro blogging, but this "feature" of Google search stopped me from doing it. What's the point of writing succinct, to-the-point mini articles about problems and solutions if nobody finds them on Google?

skilled 5y ago
This is largely because micro-blogging means less content, and less content means you could write five 300-word blog posts instead of one 1,500-word post. I've done blogging for the last 10+ years, and many of those I spent as a freelancer working with startups/brands/editorials. Everyone is after "word count" and I absolutely hate it. Whenever I work on articles for my own blog, I just don't consider word-count at all. I think if your content is great and informative, then readership will be natural.
- vntok 5y ago
  This is a very interesting approach. Do you have traffic data collection on your blog?
  - skilled 5y ago
    I collect post views, but not using Google Analytics or anything like that. I built a pretty substantial developer blog (tips, resources, etc,.) back in 2014. I think it peaked at around 350,000 monthly visitors after 12 months. Later on, I sold it because I needed the money. Not so much that I didn't want to keep working on it. Unfortunately, the new owners didn't have any idea how to maintain a "healthy" content blog, and it has plummeted down to around 30,000 monthly visitors. All the content they're publishing now is some thin headline-clickbait bullshit. I even gave them free advice on how to fix it, but I think that for a lot of people, they just don't care and will mindlessly pump out as many pieces of content as possible. And such blogs can be identified from a mile away. And therein lies the problem with Google SEO at the moment. Even myself, someone who has done SEO work for more than a decade, I can see that results are getting worse. In some niches, the same crappy articles that dominated 6-7 years ago are still dominant today. I guess we're stuck in time, or so Google thinks.
    - behnamoh 5y ago
      Could it also be due to reduction of public interest in blogs over the past few years? Most stuff are now published in the form of vlogs instead of blogs. I do miss the good old blogs era, tho, and I wish there were still high quality blogs around.

throwawayboise 5y ago

It's two-fold. If Google priortizes pages with a lot of content that's one thing, but longer content also means more space for ads, or more scroll events to trigger ads, etc. Incidentally, prioritizing long content seems odd to me, in my experience the best pages are short and get right to the point, at least in the context of something like a recipe or other "how to" resources.

wakiza33 5y ago

prioritizes is correct, but in some ways it's not the best descriptor. Google's algos, while advanced, still rely a ton on text to actually tell what the page is about. They need it. If they just relied on other factors (title, links, website, etc.) they would end up with worse results for users. Im sure they've tested it. Google's core algo in a lot of ways is much simpler than people think (in other ways of course it's very complex).

UncleMeat 5y ago

This one is hard because it does actually seem to be the case that the cruft around the recipe is valuable if the content is right. Most of the recipe blog stuff is garbage, but if you look at youtube it is clear that creators who add extra flair around the recipe are a powerful force.

kevinmchugh 5y ago

Recipe intro text is useful for contextualizing the recipe and copyright purposes. In RSS days, it was a way to get readers to click through, so the author got the ad views. Also people who write recipes like to write about food.

awillen 5y ago
I'd say it can be useful, but that's not often the case (especially not to the tune of 1000+ words).

dredmorbius 5y ago

This reminds me of the page inflation that struck tech books during the late 1990s / early aughts. The Marketing Wisdom was that fat books sold (or took up more shelf space), so texts got padded with weak writing, gratuitous puffery, and other elements, which (much as the recipie essays) simply got in the way of delivering actual informative content. (The fact that many of these books were rushed out with very poor quality control also didn't help.)

sct202 5y ago

While I think the essays are excessive, I appreciate that some of them document that the blogger actually made the recipe with progress pictures. With the more basic recipes websites, I wonder if anyone's actually made it before or if the recipe is from some scrapped database of unknown origin and quality.