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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They don’t do it for search engine optimization. Well, not entirely anyways.
Recipes aren’t copyrightable. But, articles about a recipe are. So, everyone writes a long article talking about their recipe – then they can cease-and-desist anyone who copies that recipe as infringing on their article.
And, it’s not just recipes. For just one other example, magic tricks aren’t copyrightable, so Penn and Teller write little scenes that go with their tricks, so that if someone steals the trick, they can sue them. [This is one of the tricks they specifically wrote a story to for just this reason.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJH9iFOji_A)
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.
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Enjoy
It’s because legally you can copy a recipe – it is a description of a process, which is a fact. Facts cannot be copywritten.
However, the long stories and descriptions are their own intellectual property, and that cannot be legally copied to another website (not saying it doesn’t happen anyway).
So the stories become the unique bits around a recipe that’s probably on hundreds of sites. People like unique content, and so does Google.
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