Sad and annoying. Top Google results are very likely to include long articles that ramble on and on and never get to the point, in the name of "optimization". Search Engine Optimization is Reader Experience Pessimization.

I look forward to the day that a recipe doesn't come with a life story prepended to it.

With video advertising, sites have started to optimize for length of stay on the page rather than hits and I hate it.

The recipe format was perfected in the middle ages - a simple list of ingredients and a description of the steps required. But the sites that capture the first page of search results for even the simplest recipe are all designed to keep you on the page long enough for the video ads to play through.

Listen up idiots, if I like your recipe I will be on your page for minutes figuring out how to follow it and will return every time I want to make the meal. Your stats will be favorable - no need to bother me with how your dead granny used to make roast beef sandwiches or whatever.

Just another way that advertising kills everything it touches.

So, I have a question: I'm seeing lots of videos on social media that are very long. They're cute or funny or amazing or something, but they seem like they are artificially long, like they are trying to keep me in the act of viewing them. If they aren't an advertisement themselves, then why is this the trend? What is the reward for engaging a viewer in a sight gag for several minutes? Are they gaming the ad companies by padding some "average view time" or something?

It sure smells like shenanigans, I'm just not sure why.

I don't know about FB, but Youtube videos can only be monetized if they're a minimum of 10 minutes long. That's why videos by 'Youtubers' can be so painful to watch; they are trying to stretch out 2 minutes of content into 10, and it's obvious.

You won't even get to see the recipe if there isn't something about the dead granny sandwiches in there. It will be forever hidden into the 300th page of search results.

And often then at the end the recipe is junk! Click bait world in action. Valuable content is drowned out and click bait gets promoted.

I thought this was just a "natural" trend for advertising or something, I didn't realize it was a SEO thing.

I've been noticing more and more that every time I'm looking for a recipe, I end up with a blog post the size of a novella as the first few results.

Recipe pages are long because Google penalizes sites with "high bounce rate", i.e. where the user opened the page, didn't interact with it (clicked a link, scrolled x% of the screen) and left, or clicked Back.

A recipe blog post where you can simply copy/paste the recipe into your notes app is going to receive a bad SEO grade.

That's why so much of the Internet feels so 'corporate' or make so many seemingly 'WTF' choices. They are optimizing around a monetization and growth strategy, not for your experience as a user.

> Recipe pages are long because Google penalizes sites with "high bounce rate", i.e. where the user opened the page, didn't interact with it (clicked a link, scrolled x% of the screen) and left, or clicked Back. A recipe blog post where you can simply copy/paste the recipe into your notes app is going to receive a bad SEO grade.

Do many people actually copy-paste recipes? I usually open a recipe page and keep it open until I'm done with the dish). If I like the result I may copy the recipe.

Is that a feature or a byproduct? It doesn't make sense to me on the surface that a larger text would be linked to more necessarily.

The length of a text doesn't seem like it would factor into the outcome of the page ranking unless I'm missing something.

How would you determine what is a "good" or "bad" article, given a reader's preferences rather than one that simply gets associated most regularly with a search query?

As I understand it, Google (and others?) rank pages higher if the time spent on them is high. Long text takes longer to read, so it's a way to increase that metric.

Another explanation I've seen is for ranking longer texts higher is that longer text is assumed to be of higher quality because it's more content/took more work to produce/whatever.

Whatever the reason, this leads to the rambling articles I mentioned, which seems to be a trend even for cases when the actual useful content is short.

Such is the logic but, in reality, a long-winded article is just as likely to have folks heading for the back button in no time at all?

Yes, in practice the user will either get angry for having to dig for the useful stuff or simply give up.

Yup like those recipe pages where there's 4 paragraphs and photos unrelated to the recipe and then a box with the recipe at the bottom of the page.

OP here, I think this is a consequence of choosing bad KPIs (like time spent on page) to define what should rank higher.

In my experience the best approach to deal with this is the TLDR on top idea, so the Reader experience stays good and then going deep into the topic for the curious ones and the SEO juice

It's a workaround, but I think the real problem, as you mention, is search engines using time spent on page as a proxy metric for "this page is useful", which in many situations just isn't the case.

I'm conflicted about the notion that "no one has time to read your article." That says more about dilapidation of reading culture than the fact that length of a text is necessarily bad. I see it happening to me and I don't read something not because it is valueless on its own but because there is simply too much else outside of it drawing on my attention.

If there's more and more pressure to say less, eventually you'll say nothing. If you say everything, nobody will read it unless they have eyes set on your work.

Most people seem to be trained to write an expository piece in a classical model of assert a premise => provide an argument => yield a conclusion. They're not used to putting the conclusion where the premise should be sort of like an abstract.

Imagine that you're searching for a solution to a Javascript issue, and you see two search results. One has the answer and links to a working Codepen, and the other provides some conceptual information and links you to MDN documentation so you can figure the answer out for yourself.

Which one are you going to read first? If you picked the first one, does that indicate a dilapidation in reading ability, or that you needed an answer, and the first option provided the best one?

Honestly, if you've written a coding article which doesn't have any code in it, you've probably messed up somewhere along the line. Generally, I'd say it's expected that anything programming related likely has at least a few code samples and a few demos to test out, otherwise its usefulness is rather limited.

> dilapidation of reading culture

Surely we read more than we ever did? Surely more people a literate than ever before?

Certainly we didn't read much television...

My friends that are dyslexic or illiterate have learnt to read in their 30s and 40s because of the internet.

That long articles are necessary to rank in Google is a myth. https://twitter.com/mnlfrgr/status/1074653395997388800

2000 words has never been the SEO optimal or standard length for articles. I've been involved in SEO for many, many years, 500 was always the standard.

Interesting. I know 500 was the standard. But my understanding is that the big Google updates (Panda et al) put paid to that model in favour of the "authority site" model, hence you're supposed to rank better for longer content.

I wonder if it only applies to new blogs though? Perhaps if you have good DA/PA/TTF metrics already then it doesn't actually matter about your content length.

Didn't know that! Great advice, I think that the origin of this might be in the fact that longer content is generally more researched and thus ranks better

Yeah, that is possible. However, correlation != causation ;)

With all due respect, one single article ranking #1 in Google hardly constitutes proof, or turns the argument into a myth.

I am genuinely interested in the answer to this though. The idea that the article has to be longer/more detailed than the competition makes total sense.

I would need to see a citation for this. I work with digital marketing folks a lot, who are well-versed in things like SEO, and the general trend seems is toward shorter and more frequent content. That's not to say that I don't write a longer piece when the content warrants it, but for written articles/blogs/etc. 800-1000 words seems to be fairly common. Certainly there's also something of a trend from giveaway long books to 25-50 page ones.

This seems like one of those things that will reverse itself. Once a measure is known to its subjects it becomes worthless. (That's not my idea but I'm too lazy to look up the source right now.) If enough people write long articles just for SEO, the algorithm will change and they might actually find themselves penalized. Then there will be lots of whining from folks who thought they could profit by prioritizing SEO over quality and by treating SEO as a one-time-solvable problem.