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My "bar" for how Google does here is how it treats recipe pages. I absolutely loath what SEO has done for recipe pages, because now essentially every recipe pag
by hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
My "bar" for how Google does here is how it treats recipe pages. I absolutely loath what SEO has done for recipe pages, because now essentially every recipe page looks exactly the same:
1. Tons and tons of content about the history of the recipe, how humans first domesticated wheat, when the ancient Egyptians first discovered yeast as a leavening agent, etc. etc.
2. Then, after thousands and thousands of words, there is a short recipe for bread at the bottom of the page.
In fairness, this is a hard problem to solve. Some sites (rarely) have good information on techniques or things like substitutions in all that copy. But the vast majority of the time all that copy is just useless drivel to appeal to search engines. So my question is whether a great but pithy recipe for, say, focaccia or whatever would make it to the top of the search rankings, or will Google always favor the verbal diarrhea that sullies all recipe sites these days?
- carlosjobim 3y agoDownload or buy a bunch of recipe books and then search inside them. They're of much greater quality. YouTube cooking videos are also superior in quality to anything you'll find on Google.
- sollewitt 3y agoIs the long text purely for SEO or because a longer page gives more opportunities for ad impressions and higher engagement metrics?
- pests 3y agoRecipes are not copyrightable so the only thing that sets each site apart is the surrounding story and nonsense described above - otherwise every recipe is flagged as duplicate content.
- al_borland 3y agoI think forcing a user to scroll past 20 ads is a huge part of it. Usually by the time I get halfway down the page I give up on the idea of cooking. I sometimes wonder how much of the costs associated with running a website are to pay for all the bandwidth for ads, SEO experts, etc… when a simple site with HTML and a dash of CSS could likely host recipes very cheaply.
- sgarland 3y agoI also frequently wonder what the excess cost (monetary, environmental, etc.) is for the modern web’s habits. Optimized schema? Nah, just chuck everything into a huge JSON blob. Need one function that you could honestly write yourself? Import this huge package instead.
- verve_rat 3y agoIt's not that hard to solve if you have a "I like this / I hate this" signal from the user. Unfortunately for Google, G+ was probably their best chance at something like that. Now they just have stuff like time on page to try and figure that out.
- akasakahakada 3y agoNo I could just make another bot to rank myself higher.
- mminer237 3y agoGoogle already has to implement bot protection for its ads.
- bcraven 3y agohttps://www.justtherecipe.com/ https://www.justtherecipe.com/ Perhaps this is a case where Google could rip the recipe off the page and display it in Search.