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Comment by andrenth | Hacker News Reader

Sad and annoying. Top Google results are very likely to include long articles that ramble on and on and never get to the point, in the name of "optimization". Search Engine Optimization is Reader Experience Pessimization.

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I look forward to the day that a recipe doesn't come with a life story prepended to it.

With video advertising, sites have started to optimize for length of stay on the page rather than hits and I hate it.

The recipe format was perfected in the middle ages - a simple list of ingredients and a description of the steps required. But the sites that capture the first page of search results for even the simplest recipe are all designed to keep you on the page long enough for the video ads to play through.

Listen up idiots, if I like your recipe I will be on your page for minutes figuring out how to follow it and will return every time I want to make the meal. Your stats will be favorable - no need to bother me with how your dead granny used to make roast beef sandwiches or whatever.

Just another way that advertising kills everything it touches.

So, I have a question: I'm seeing lots of videos on social media that are very long. They're cute or funny or amazing or something, but they seem like they are artificially long, like they are trying to keep me in the act of viewing them. If they aren't an advertisement themselves, then why is this the trend? What is the reward for engaging a viewer in a sight gag for several minutes? Are they gaming the ad companies by padding some "average view time" or something?

It sure smells like shenanigans, I'm just not sure why.

I don't know about FB, but Youtube videos can only be monetized if they're a minimum of 10 minutes long. That's why videos by 'Youtubers' can be so painful to watch; they are trying to stretch out 2 minutes of content into 10, and it's obvious.

You won't even get to see the recipe if there isn't something about the dead granny sandwiches in there. It will be forever hidden into the 300th page of search results.

And often then at the end the recipe is junk! Click bait world in action. Valuable content is drowned out and click bait gets promoted.

I thought this was just a "natural" trend for advertising or something, I didn't realize it was a SEO thing.

I've been noticing more and more that every time I'm looking for a recipe, I end up with a blog post the size of a novella as the first few results.

Recipe pages are long because Google penalizes sites with "high bounce rate", i.e. where the user opened the page, didn't interact with it (clicked a link, scrolled x% of the screen) and left, or clicked Back.

A recipe blog post where you can simply copy/paste the recipe into your notes app is going to receive a bad SEO grade.

That's why so much of the Internet feels so 'corporate' or make so many seemingly 'WTF' choices. They are optimizing around a monetization and growth strategy, not for your experience as a user.

> Recipe pages are long because Google penalizes sites with "high bounce rate", i.e. where the user opened the page, didn't interact with it (clicked a link, scrolled x% of the screen) and left, or clicked Back. A recipe blog post where you can simply copy/paste the recipe into your notes app is going to receive a bad SEO grade.

Do many people actually copy-paste recipes? I usually open a recipe page and keep it open until I'm done with the dish). If I like the result I may copy the recipe.

Is that a feature or a byproduct? It doesn't make sense to me on the surface that a larger text would be linked to more necessarily.

The length of a text doesn't seem like it would factor into the outcome of the page ranking unless I'm missing something.

How would you determine what is a "good" or "bad" article, given a reader's preferences rather than one that simply gets associated most regularly with a search query?

As I understand it, Google (and others?) rank pages higher if the time spent on them is high. Long text takes longer to read, so it's a way to increase that metric.

Another explanation I've seen is for ranking longer texts higher is that longer text is assumed to be of higher quality because it's more content/took more work to produce/whatever.

Whatever the reason, this leads to the rambling articles I mentioned, which seems to be a trend even for cases when the actual useful content is short.

Such is the logic but, in reality, a long-winded article is just as likely to have folks heading for the back button in no time at all?

Yes, in practice the user will either get angry for having to dig for the useful stuff or simply give up.

Yup like those recipe pages where there's 4 paragraphs and photos unrelated to the recipe and then a box with the recipe at the bottom of the page.

OP here, I think this is a consequence of choosing bad KPIs (like time spent on page) to define what should rank higher.

In my experience the best approach to deal with this is the TLDR on top idea, so the Reader experience stays good and then going deep into the topic for the curious ones and the SEO juice

It's a workaround, but I think the real problem, as you mention, is search engines using time spent on page as a proxy metric for "this page is useful", which in many situations just isn't the case.

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