Google has necessarily arbitrary criteria by which pages are ranked. Because Google is the game in town, anyone with a primary goal of driving traffic will purs

Google has necessarily arbitrary criteria by which pages are ranked. Because Google is the game in town, anyone with a primary goal of driving traffic will pursue those metrics (i.e. SEO). To the extent that those criteria deviate even slightly from actual good results, large parts of the internet will dilute their content to pursue them, which both lowers their quality and further drives down the gems of the internet. The ranking would have to vary over an infinite spread of purposes for webpages, and it would have to converge almost perfectly to what is actually most helpful. Among all the technical problems, Google will not optimize correctly against ads for the same reason that websites trying to drum up affiliate purchases and ad revenue won't put content quality above SEO. When recipes return to having the recipe and ingredients first, followed by an optional life story,I'll revisit my assessment.