That is a quirk of Ghost, it took the summary text from the blog homepage and inserted it into the post. I fixed it.

I didn't purposefully use that phrase repeatedly. Thanks for spotting.

Your post got roasted!

The roaster became the roastee

My, how the spitroast has turned

The content is algorithm first, not human first. I too refrain from consuming articles written for computers.

Is this why recipes online are such a pain?

"Want to check my roasted platypus recipe? Check out this 1000 words tell on why I love roasting platypuses"

Of course paired with an auto play video of unrelated content.

"I'll get to the recipe in a minute, but first let me tell you about the time I dropped a penny into the Trevi Fountain in Rome. You see, I had just broken up with my first boyfriend and..."

F%(*ing insufferable madness

Copyright. The recipe itself can't be copyrighted, but the descriptive text around it can. This created a style in print media that carried over into the online world.

I don't really follow. Who cares about copyright of their blog post when a recipe can't be copyrighted (ergo the valuable asset is not protected)?

My understanding is that it's Google PageRank's "fault".

Because every one of these websites has a google tracker embedded in it, google knows how long you spend on a website. If you load a page then don't interact with it or leave quickly, it assumes you didn't find what you were looking for. The longer you're fumbling around looking for the valuable part of the page (the recipe) the higher the site ranks amongst recipe sites for PageRank, the more hits they'll get in the future.

So - Slowing the current reader down will produce bonus readers later.

It's pretty sad webpages now are written for search engines to parse and only incidentally, for humans to read.

It wasn't written for search.

Nobody googles titles like 'what I learnt'

The blog post shares every single insight I learnt reviewing landing pages and running my business without any SEO implemented at all.

Ignore the haters. They don't have anything better to do. It's a great article and I found it really useful!

Bookmarked, on the assumption that you were right.

Did I miss the data that backs up your assertions that the improvements were effective?

This used to be the case but Google is getting much better at understanding topics and how they relate to each other. These days, writing good quality content that is comprehensive is best for humans and Google. Sure there is some gaming of the system but it's not like it used to be

It's way worse now.

TFA?

https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly

What is TFA?

It stands for “The Fucking Article”.

For a more sensible answer, I use "The Featured Article"

TFA (thanks for answering).

The Fabulous Article

Similar to how RTFM stands for "Read The Fabulous Manual"

I didn’t know what TFA was and my best guess was “the full article”. This makes me realize RTFM could also be interpreted as read the full manual, which feels amusing.

What, you never read all of the man pages on your Linux distro?

I've always understood the F in any of these to translate to "fine" when in ahem polite company. Same number of characters.

[EDIT] LOL wow that justification is wrong, forgot about the 'ing'. Still, that's the word I've usually seen subbed.

I will now be reading "AF" as "as fabulous".

Its Fucking

If anyone is curious, the historical context for this (probably) comes from Slashdot, circa the year 2000, typical use is/was "I didn't RTFA, but..." or "did you even RTFA?, because..."

The "Friendly" Article

"Big... FRIENDLY Gun 9000"

The fine article

Interesting that you call this out. You're right! But I didn't notice it at all.

Maybe I just got used to this sort of pattern, or maybe this is where being a skimmer actually benefits me...

But I do want a Diet Coke.