why does having a long story before a recipe help websites get better search engine results?

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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

16 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hi Everyone,

This post is rather popular and thats wonderful, to people coming to us from the front page I encourage you to look through the rules in the sidebar before participating (this is a rather strict sub).

In particular rule 3, Top level comments (replies to the post itself) must be explanations to OP. So this means no: links to add ons (or link only responses), no anecdotes about how you feel the same way, and no examples of where you have also seen this. Also no speculation about business motivations (rule 8), the question is about search engines.

If you have a particularly interesting off topic comment/link feel free to stick it as a reply to this pinned post, and let me know if you have other questions.

Also if you have suggestions for the sub we encourage you to use r/IdeasForELI5 as our idea forum.

Enjoy

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