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.