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Comment by gamerDude | Hacker News Reader

If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below?

Yes. I worked at a site that had an SEO-obsessed boss and basically the keywords, placement of keywords, formatting of the page, everything...all affected SEO.

However, that all likely paled in comparison to him gaming the system by paying to host separate sites that linked back to his in an effort to boost legitimacy during the times when SEO was a make or break thing.

The more I read about SEO, the more dystopian it sounds.

"Please, I'll write whatever you want. Just list me!"

It's definitely an arms race. Sort of like tax avoidance. As long as you have search engines ordering results, I guess you'll have people who seek to game the results. The question for me is whether what Google does can be improved upon. I think we can do much better.

That only covers backlinks and authority, it's just one piece of the puzzle. Ironically, that's called a "black-hat" way of obtaining backlinks and authority. The "white-hat" way is to go to legit websites and purchase links, literally pay them to link your website. This is a great example of what's considered "ethical" in SEO

> If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below?

From an SEO perspective, yes.

Time spent on page will be less if the recipe is on the top.

A better measure as to whether the user found what they were looking for would be if Google checked if the user continues browsing through subsequent search results or not.

Google does check this. It’s called bounce rate and is just one piece of the SEO puzzle. Keeping users on your site longer before they “bounce” is another, so these sites are incentivized to keep you on the page for as long as possible because they know that it’s unlikely for a user to find the exact recipe they are looking for.

Such bs. I rarely spend more than 20s on a recipe page anyways. I scroll quickly to find ingredients box and thats it. Done...

At this level of optimization even the 0.25s spent scrolling past a story is enough to make a difference... this is like "competitive swimmers shaving off their body hair" level SEO.

...How do you follow the recipe? Or are we talking simple recipes where the steps are simple?

For me, at least, I typically don't follow the recipe. Very rarely am I looking for cooking instruction. I'm familiar enough with most typical cooking techniques that ingredient list and proportions, plus sometimes a quick glance at the steps, is all I need to get the job done. I'm usually modifying the ingredients on the fly as I cook the dish anyway.

When I am looking for cooking instruction, I find my existing library of trusted cookbooks to have a much better signal to noise ratio than Googled recipes sites on the web.

I wish there were some “intermediate” websites for cooking. There seems to be a missing middle, where I don’t know exactly to do, but know enough basics to only meed a little bit of direction.

Ie, not step by step, but more general. Let me improvise, but still guide me.

Placing recipes on the bottom and behind “click to show” type features forces users to remain on your site for a longer period of time. This makes it appear to Google that users are more “engaged” on your website because it takes longer for them to bounce in the cases where the recipe isn’t what they are looking for.

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