Whenever I’m looking for recipes online there is invariable a long story about the author’s family and which family members like this dish and which ones do not. I’m sure I’m not the only person who thinks this is vey uninteresting and just wants to get to the cookie recipe but I’ve heard that doing this gives websites better chances of turning up higher in search results.
Why do these stories improve search rankings? Who decided to set the settings that caused this?
In: Technology
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Another aspect of this search engine optimization is simply content depth and key word frequency.
The exact details of search engine algorithms are closely guarded trade secrets, but we know that page ranking has to deal with two competing problems.
You want sites with lots of on topic content to be ranked higher than sites with less content. But at the same time, you don’t want people being able to fake their way up the rankings with a bunch of nonsense “word salad” of keywords.
So search engines count keywords and content depth but they also try to eliminate sites with keyword nonsense. A bare recipe doesn’t read like valid English to some methods of analysis and is “shallow content”. Someone’s family history with a recipe reads better, increases content depth and still allows for repetition of keywords.
It improves retention time, and thus makes it look like people enjoy or are getting more out of the website.
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Google search results are a good way to attract readers to a piece of content but getting people to subscribe is considerably more valuable.
There’s some good informative answers here but there’s more to these stories than search results. There’s also something to be said for reaching a target demographic and creating relationships with your readers. There are some people who enjoy the transparency into someone else’s daily life. This demographic may be more likely to subscribe to your newsletter and return over and over.
One factor is repeat content. Most search engines tend to view identical or near identical content as a single result, so that they dont serve up a dozen results that are virtually the same. As a result, only one of those identical pages will be considered the “authoritative” source of the information, and itll be the only one that gets served.
If you’re posting a recipe, the likelihood is that your set of ingredients for a dish wont vary much from the next guy, and you all run the risk of being collectively lumped together. If you include a long and unique story introducing the recipe first, you’re much less likely to be considered duplicate content, and thus more likely to show up in search results.
Basically, because Google can’t hire millions people to read through every page on the internet, so they have to use algorithms instead.
Google’s algorithms use certain markers to figure out what a website page is about and whether someone searching on Google wants to see it.
There are a few markers that they use, but the most important ones are:
1. Keyword relevance
2. Keyword density
For each page, google looks at a word or phrase that summarises what the page is about (e.g. “fruitcake recipe”). This is your page keyword.
If you google “fruitcake recipe”, that’s a tick in the relevancy box. But Google also wants to see that you really know about the topic. Are you the best page for it to highlight when someone is searching for a fruitcake recipe? Do you know more than any other page about fruitcake recipes?
The way to show Google you are is by putting plenty of the phrase “fruitcake recipe” in the page, show Google you’re a really good source of fruitcake recipe information, going really in depth into the content.
Just spamming the words “fruitcake recipe” isn’t any good though, Google is pretty good at figuring out spam content vs real content, so you’ve got to write yourself a real blog post that mentions it a lot.
There aren’t that many blog posts to write about fruitcake recipes though, so you write a blog post about how your grandma passed down the recipe on her death bed etc etc.
Well now Google thinks that you’re the best darned content on fruitcake recipes and pushes that content right up to number 1 of the google search page (a simplification, but you get the idea).
The algorithms work really well for most things, blogs and information articles especially. They are very good at answering questions and giving you the information you need, something Google was designed for, but they mean that certain websites have to jump through disingenuous ‘hoops’ to make sure they’re seen (such as a 600 word blog post on how fruitcake recipes make them feel).
There are plenty of recipes that DON’T do this, but you never see them because they’re on page 9 of Google searches. Thus it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
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