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OG food blogs like Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz emulated the classic cookbook style, and, not surprisingly, those authors have gone on to make a lot of money writing traditional cookbooks. The only cookbook I own that doesn't have intro text for each recipe is a culinary school textbook, so the authors felt safe assuming a certain level of familiarity with the terms and techniques used. The best cookbooks use this intro to describe unusual techniques or flavor combinations in the recipe, so the intro text in such books can be really helpful and is sometimes critical to getting the recipe right the first time you try to make it. > My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc?Ĭookbooks that sell well usually have some introductory text for every recipe. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? This could easily be a browser extension. Projects like OP probably just parse out the semantic tags and throw away the rest of the content. Unfortunately, it's against google's interest to promote to-the-point recipe pages that have fewer embedded AdWords blocks. Semantic tags then makes it easier to identify "this is a recipe page", but that means for such a crowded category it's a race to the bottom with optimization and ad-stuffing (more life story = more inline ad blocks). Recipes are something that people who search for recipes do several times a week, so the algorithms identified this as a Thing with High DAU's. If you want to know what categories of things will have especially horrendous (ie clickbait-optimized-to-hell) results, look at the other things that google encourages developers to semantically tag and compete for use of the shiny results page features. So what's to stop me from simply faking my own star system, then presenting it on my website so that google picks it up in its results? And what triggers Google to look for a star rating? Could I update my tech blog to have a star rating and Google will show it? Or is it limited to keywords like "recipe"?īecause "Recipes" are one of about a dozen categories for which google defines special Structure Data formats, which allows presumably-high-clickthrough results page features like the rich media carousel previews, etc. Which is obviously meaningless because comparing 4.5 stars from to 4.5 stars from is apples-to-oranges. Second question - anyone who has searched for recipes also knows that Google will parse out any star rating from the recipe page and show it alongside the results. My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc? What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? The recipes are often fine, too (probably because they're frequently cribbed from cookbooks with a few tweaks). And because those SEO tricks seem to work, this type of site absolutely dominates the search results for recipes. Interspersed liberally with enormous high-res photos of the finished product, the ingredients, stock photos of summertime, etc. I love good food writers, but most people who publish recipes online are not good food writers, and SEO tactics lead them to preface their recipes not with information about the development of the recipe or the food's cultural context, but with rambling space-filler about how it's summer now, and how it's nice to eat summer foods in the summer, and there are delicious farm-fresh veggies in the summer, and this summer veggie salad really tastes like summer, and how as a kid the author would also eat veggies in the summer, and how even though the author's husband ("the Truck-Drivin' Man") and their three boys ("Colt, Smith, and Wesson") normally don't like veggies that much, they really love this salad.
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