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Comment by RobertoG | Hacker News Reader

It kind of ruined content too.

Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content.

Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content.

In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of content created, unfortunately, as we are going to explain in a moment, it has been ruined by SEO.

¿Is it SEO really the reason content was ruined?

Some people argue that SEO is not really the reason content was ruined, we will review all the reason why SEO could be really ruining content.

Please, click "next" to know why SEO could be ruining content.

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I just searched (1) "SEO ruined content" in duck duck go and this Hacker news page is the first entry.

We are very lucky that, as far as we know, an accumulation of irony doesn't create black holes.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SEO+ruined+content&t=canonical&ia=...

Awesome.

Currently page 2 on Google.

To be fair, "SEO ruined content" is a pretty specific search string and doesn't even show up in the results that out-rank this submission. This comment specifically talks about "SEO ruined content" and is, correctly, a good results candidate.

>Currently page 2 on Google.

And now on first page

5th result.

It's the first one for me now.

Likewise.

Very specific indeed, no data on Ahrefs for this keyword.

Keyword Difficulty < 15

Ahrefs estimate that you’ll need backlinks from ~17 websites to rank in top 10 for this keyword

HA! People collect significant paychecks for what you just did. I love this so much.

Neat!

Even above the article that we're discussing. Hilarious. And a very good demonstration of the problem.

Ok, now that we agree this is neat (I am impressed!), what’s the solution?

Google or not, what can help me discover the right recipe, the right content, the right answer to my coding error?

Search algorithms that keep “mutating” even randomly? Ranking system? What?

I fear it's incredibly hard to fight fake content with automated systems. You need the ability to understand the content to determine whether the content is actually meaningful. For that, you need far better intelligence than just some fancy text processing.

You need people, basically. If you want to automate it, you need some way to figure out what people think about that content. This has been tried by counting how many people link to it, or rate it highly, but those methods have also been gamed to death.

First result on Google now. Well done!

Yep.

Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients.

How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had something that would scan for words and their synonyms and tag articles, a rescan feature for tags that got added after the fact, and various other utilities.

I find this particular example particularly gross. Recipe's are no doubt a heavily searched category. Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots? does it have to do with the google ads from top to bottom?

>Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots?

Something bothered me about this question, and I think it's the way it frames Google's role as being a passive participant.

Google doesn't "allow" anything. Google writes the rules and picks the winners.

When you search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe," Google's search algorithm goes "Here's a nice webpage with Grandma Betty's life story and a paragraph about how to make chocolate chip cookies at the bottom. This is what you were looking for."

Recipe sites look like they do because Google forces them to look like that if they want Google to send them any search traffic.

Is there a different algorithm that would give more useful results? Is there a way to rank the sites on how well they present the information you were searching for? Is there a way to factor in whether a site has good recipes or terrible ones? I don't know, but I don't have a giant advertising money fountain and teams of very well paid engineers.

Like you hinted at, I think it's reasonable to suspect Google for not having an incentive to fix this. They get their ad money either way, and they probably get more of it from worse sites. As long as it's good enough to keep people from switching to other search engines en masse, they're not losing anything.

There's also manual tweaking. It's why known scam phishing sites and DMCA takedowns don't "win".

It's not just some simple disinterested mathematical orchestration without any engagement or other layer

Seems like it’d be fairly straightforward to identify a post by genre and then weight for terseness.

Long time ago having your site in a high quality curated directory like DMOZ boosted your search ranks a lot.

I was an editor for a few categories at DMOZ. Not only I allowed only good content in our categories, but I checked older approvals from time to time to see if they behave. I had to delist some websites who thought they can trick us.

Filler content is the cost of ad supported content sites.

Pay for a Cooks Illustrates or NYT Cooking subscription and all these problems go away.

I have never understood what the filler content on recipe pages is accomplishing though. It somehow makes the page do better in google? How?

More space for ads.

Plain and simple, Google won't rank you without it. Google looks for additional filler when ranking. Otherwise you would see different kinds of sites.

Then we have to blame Google, not the authors.

Right, but is there any explanation for why a recipe page with several pages of filler content ranks better on Google though?

I assume (?) it is not google engineers tuning for this particular outcome on purpose...

Not all that plain and simple.

And if you want it all in one place, an entire compendium of tried and tested recipes, pick up a copy of one of Cooks Illustrated's New Best Recipe books, even an older one.

I have a copy from probably 5 years ago that seems to be out of print and can be had for $7 used. It's 900+ pages of well-tested recipes where each one has a narrative about how they tested and arrived at the final recipe.

The website is searchable and has videos. :-D

Cooks Illustrated is amazing, the rigor they go through testing everything, and adapting to available ingredients, makes for such incredible reliability!

It lets you know whether the recipe is any good.

You searching for a bibimbap recipe and their page is split into Hangul and English pages and this was the recipe their grandma uses? You bet your ass it's going to be good.

You find something on allrecipes.com, how do you know if this is a good recipe? Only if you already know it is.

Or you could buy a cookbook. There's a bunch of them out there. Some are good, some are bad, some are long-lived classics, some are deep dives into a particular cuisine by someone who knows it inside out.

You'll still have to suffer through a certain amount of SEO bullshit, you probably don't wanna just go to Amazon and try buying the best-selling cookbook in whatever cuisine you're interested in because that's got its own Amazon-specific SEO clogging things up, but...

My local libraries always have donated cookbooks for sale for 25 cents to a dollar. What is surprising is their number and variety.

Books? You mean those old fashioned things made out of paper with black signs on it?

Most are black and white only and don't even have pictures.

Grandpa used to read that.

Yes! Books. Most cookbooks have a lot of full color pictures. They also lack ads, if they have a story to give context to the writer’s relationship with the cuisine it will be a few paragraphs introducing the whole book rather than at the head of every recipe. They do not have any DRM; once you buy one it is yours to keep, give, or loan as you will.

If one gets wet (not at all inconceivable for something used in the kitchen) you merely have to dry it out. It will be slightly wrinkly but it will work fine, unlike a wet phone/tablet/laptop. It’ll have the dish you’re interested in plus a whole lot more, you probably won’t want to make every single one of them but there’s probably gonna be a few that look worth trying.

It will not track you. It is easy to store where it is needed. If you want to make notes - maybe you loved this dish and hated that one, maybe you made a variant that your SO loved - it’s easy to make them with a pen or pencil, and have them visible without any extra interaction. It’s a pretty useful technology!

Even worse when you do find the recipe it uses some crazy measuring system!

What is one "cup" of flour? It obviously depends on how fine the flour is. Use grams! Use ounces! But above all use some kind of real measurement!

Psst, dude, i recently found out there are conversion tables for Freedom Units!

Most Americans don't have a kitchen scale

I know that different cultures are different, but I always think of Americans as being (kitchen) gadget-obsessed.

Maybe I've watched too many infomercials and soaps. I've reached a point where I know Americans don't have (electric) kettles, but a scale seems like a necessity for anybody who cooks.

(I guess there are lot of people, American, or otherwise, who just don't cook. So I'd understand in that case. But cooking without a scale just seems surprising. Even where I come from a grew up with a balance-scale with brass weights. Never hugely accurate, but always available.)

It's because Americans mainly cook with volumes ("1 cup flour") and not masses ("100g flour"). Just look at any American recipe book - it will use volumes instead of weights.

Wait, Canadian here, American's don't have electric kettles?

Apparently they're unusual and not at all common.

People seem to prefer to use the kinda old-fashioned manual kettles you place on the top of a stove.

Yeah, cups of flour annoy me to no end. The difference between a cup of packed down flour in the bag vs flour that's been sifted is something like 30% by my rough estimate.

> What is one "cup" of flour?

8 fl oz of flour spooned into the measuring cup or 4.5 oz. by weight.

I'm not at all trying to be snarky here. Like any other specialization people who cook have organic terminology that is useful to the in-group but confusing to the out-group. A /24 isn't the same as a class C network but we all know what is being conveyed.

And you'll get much more accurate measurements of small quantities measuring by volume instead of weight since kitchen scales aren't that accurate. Knowing that 0.25 tsp is about a gram for just about any granular thing will probably do better than your scale.

It also helps convey the sig figs in recipe. Very few recipes have a tolerance of 1 g. Even finicky bread doesn't get that accurate so it's ridiculous when some bloggers write something like 113 g when without question the recipe was originally formulated to be 4.0 oz and you just messed up the conveyed tolerances by blindly converting.

I understand how to make bread, bakers-percentages, etc. It's just that when it comes to flour a cup is a terrible measurement, due to the way it packs and the different volume involved in various varieties/types of flour.

Most of the time when I'm cooking and I see an American recipe I just google the conversion; a cup of milk is easy to deal with. Just a minor irritation most of the time, but for some things it matters.

This is sooo true, every time i look for a recipe online it's all i ever see.

Recipes have become hilarious as they have transitioned into storytelling pieces for whoever is trying to promote their lifestyle blog.

This is because of a quirk of copyright; in the US at least, a recipe itself is not considered copyrightable if it is a mere listing of ingredients; however, they can be covered by copyright when they have "substantial literary expression – a description, explanation, or illustration, for example – that accompanies a recipe or formula…”.

If you want some recipes that don't have all that nonsense associated, I'd recommend the BBC's Food site[0].

[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes

Which for some reason competes with another BBC website, https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/

Don't look for crafting-ish instructions... the number of outright false farmed content is astonishing.

"Here is this stock photo of something near, we're going to teach you how to make it!" {4 unrelated steps} {stock photo again} "Tada!"

And it's surprising how many sites that are half decent on its own, if you visit it without an ad blocker they still have Taboola ads about how person in {your location} got rich in the way they don't want you to know.

I skip to print recipe straight away. The whole story is for SEO and I don't honestly think anyone ever reads it.

There's a Chrome extension to fix that: https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter

> This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.

Glad to hear this exists, but is there anything like it for Firefox?

Most Chrome extensions can now be run on Firefox without alterations.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter...

I tried loading the source as a temporary add-on, it looks like this is not one of them.

Did you see that I linked to the Firefox version of this extension?

My wife recently sent me a recipe that had a link right at the top: "Jump to recipe". It was amazing :)

I cannot say this enough: buy a recipe book.

Online recipe sites will always be absurdly verbose, because if they just posted a list, Google would either rank it poorly because it is "thin content", or scrape it and post it as a Featured Snippet. There is seemingly no in-between.

The site authors have no choice but to fill it with a bunch of warbling about their childhood, to meet Google's minimum word count, which of course the company swears doesn't exist.

See there is a double edged sword here because outstanding recipes are thesis papers explaining the motivation, concepts, prior art and research, history, experiments, methodology, equipment, and then finally, optionally even, the reipce. They should be long and verbose. You should learn something by reading a recipe.

The problem of course is that search crawlers can't tell the difference between between the two and so long but empty content is treated the same.

Book recipes have a different problem that they need to fill 100 or so pages of content and most authors have maybe 3-5 good recipes. So you get a ton of filler as well

This reads a lot like Webb and Mitchell's gift shop skit. https://youtu.be/7MFtl2XXnUc

I like your good article about content click here to see how I think about good content also

this x1000! By pandering to the algorithm of google, a lot of great content has become watered down, softened, or impacted in other ways. Titles have to be worded a certain way, article length has to be a certain length...

hoping someone else chimes in with other thoughts because I used to know more about this, and SEO cheapening quality content was one of the key takeaways I had.

Recipe blogs are the worst! Just get to the goods already!

Many now have an anchor directly to the recipe. I try to book mark those so I don't have to read about the author pontificating on the changing of the seasons or how an ingredient in the dish reminds them of childhood for the 800th time.

It's like we've flipped APIs on their heads - humans use tools to obtain the minimal data (just the recipe), while the bots make requests and receive the whole dump of pointless, extraneous fluff in return.

And here comes the business trick: API access is paid and restricted and requires you to enter a relationship with the data provider. Websites are purposefully made machine-unreadable, because otherwise a lot of people would use third-party scripts to avoid viewing ads and filler content.

The Internet is the exact opposite of what it was meant to be. Instead of giving efficient access to high-quality information, it gives inefficient access to watered down, spread-down, low-quality interaction. Site after site, query after query, we all continuously pay a little tax with our time.

This only really applies to the commercially-focused part of the Internet, though. Many Internet sites are still hosting academically-focused, non-commercial or broadly pro-social efforts, and those seem to be among the quickest adopters of Linked Open Data standards which are precisely meant to make content machine-readable, sometimes with standardized and freely available API-like endpoints for querying the underlying datastore.

That is because the ad revenue model. Not many people would pay for subscription and I don't know of other working revenue models.

More people would be willing to pay for subscription, directly or indirectly, if ad revenue model didn't exist. Otherwise, "free with ads" outcompetes all. That's why I'm in favor of banning "free with ads" wholesale.

I am not on a high moral ground to talk about ads.I am a web developer, yet I use ublock Origin.

Now, that I have some money, I am willing to pay for subscriptions, because that would mean high quality content, not because of ads. However, there were times in my life when I barely had what to eat and I barely afforded to pay for the Internet connection and paying subscriptions was the last things I was willing to do.

I suppose many of the 7 billion people living on Earth are poor enough to not afford paying for subscription.

A lot of the revenue models suck, if you pay they just put your name in a database sell it to everyone that offers still give you ads and make it impossible to cancel. I wanted to buy cooks illustrated for example but after reading about their business practices I chose not to.

> Websites are purposefully made machine-unreadable.

This is a sad result of incentives which ruined RSS, semantic web, and the original purpose of the Internet: to effectively share and communicate information globally.

Advertising (including propaganda and surveillance) and copyright are major forces in that ruination - not to say they don't have legitimate uses and benefits, but their concentrated financial interests conquered the domain. It's a kind of colonialism of public (cyber)space and collective mind.

Tax is an apt analogy, since the power lies in the control of "media" in the most general sense, to force itself in every transaction between things and people.

I believe "dis-intermediation" will help improve the free and direct flow of information. That is, to reduce the middle layers - the gate keepers, the walled gardens, intercepts (lawful or not), filters - by re-decentralizing the net.

Years ago when I was a child growing up in the icy woods of Alaska, my parents ...

... And that was when we realized that the kindling was all damp. What to do! Four hours we ...

... it reminded of our travels in Italy ...

... And that brings us to our famous three-ingredient peanut butter cookie recipe:

I once came across a "world's most amazing curry recipe" that had two ingredients; rice, and a jar of storebought curry sauce. It was actually kind of tragic.

Google has transformed any webmaster into a writer.

After a few years of writing recipes, one can transition to screenplays and novels. :)

There's a Chrome extension to fix that: https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter

If I never have to read another article with "XYZ Is Happening. Here's What it Means" or anything to that effect as a headline, it will be too soon. SEO has created lazy writing, and as a former journalist, I hate what it's happened to my one-time profession.

I can also do without sites that think they're being quirky with their newsletter popups. "Click here to subscribe" or "I'm not interested in staying informed/saving money/being in shape". Stop. You're trying too hard.

Thanks, I hate it

Every time I land on websites that have such content I am wondering why anybody would want that kind of traffic.

I mean, don't they have server costs? It's like they own an infinite amount of money bucket that constantly gets refilled somehow.

Why are advertisers even paying them for such impressions? Are they so ridiculously retarded in their business model? Can we all hurt advertisers by setting up a website like this?

I know little about the ad business but the insinuation I've heard is that the advertisers don't want those impressions, but struggle to block these sites for one reason or another. In other words, it's basically a scam.

I think most advertisers aren't even aware, the ad platforms are so full of dark patterns it's hard to avoid this stuff.

Seems to me like you have it backwards.

The reason you even got a chance to click on it is because they wrote it that way. If they didn't, it wouldn't be as visible in Google = nobody would see it. When most websites do this (to survive) folks don't have a choice.

Also, advertisers don't pay for something that's invisible.

To base your income and your future on something as volatile as Google search seem to me a terrible idea.

What if algorithm changes will tank your all your fleet of poor content websites you've spent last few years on?

Then you shut down the servers and move on. You got the ad dollars at that point, what do you care?

It’s all very parasitic and relies on a lot of disconnect. The advertisers often don’t even know what they are buying as these things go through “exchanges” that are basically computers buying and selling as real estate. The smaller the business the more likely they are to end up scammed by this because they will have less tools to monitor things.

That traffic is monetized in a few ways:

- Autoplayinig video ads

- Affiliate marketing (meal kits, cooking courses, etc)

- Adsense display ads

- Taboola/Outbrain

These don't bring in much money on a per-site basis, but the owners usually own multiple sites, so it can add up.

If you're able to get the site to grow, it becomes the easiest digital property in the world to maintain. The content doesn't need to be fresh, or engaging. People will always search for generic recipes.

That reminds me of an ad network, which was usually displayed next to webcomics, with nearly all the adds pointing to other webcomics, who all had ads from the same network… I had no idea how that network was making any money or paying anything to the websites.

Perhaps you're thinking of Hiveworks? They're less an ad network and more like a publishing company for webcomics. Many of those types of "webcomic ad-rings" are.

We have the lyrics to the sad song you're singing right now.

That is, we will have them, once someone adds them.

Deary me.

I wish I'd be around to see what future historians / archaeologists make of this.

This is especially prevalent for simple questions that would normally have simple answers.

I'd like to know when to water my mint plant without reading about the whole history of mint.

hilarious... reminds me of my favorite Mitchell/web parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc

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