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