Still, the best way to break SEO is to have actual competition in the search space. As long as SEO remains focused on Google there is an opportunity for these companies to thrive by evading SEO braindamage.
You see some of that "two readers" divide sometimes even in classic cookbooks, where "celebrity" chefs of the day might spend much of a cookbook on a long rambling memoir. Admittedly such books were generally well indexed and had table of contents to jump right to the recipes or particular recipes, but the concept of "long personal ramble of what these recipes mean to me" is an old one in cookbooks too.
One audience matches your description and is the invested reader. They want that blogger's story telling. they might make the recipe, but they're a dedicated reader.
The other audience is not the recipe-searcher, but instead Google. Food bloggers know that recipe-searchers are there to drop in, get an ingredient list, and move on. They won't even remember the blog's name. So the site isn't optimized for them. It's optimized for Google.
"Slow the parasitic recipe-searcher down. They're leeches, here for a freebie. Well they'll pay me in Google Rank time blocks."
This is not entirely true, though. If a randomly found recipe turns out particularly good, I'll bookmark the site and try out other dishes. It's a very practical method to find particularly good* recipe collections.
*) In this case "good" means what you need - not just subjectively "tasty", but e.g. low cost, quick to prepare, low calorie or in line with a particular diet and so on.
I think this assumes facts not in evidence. It certainly seems like an overwhelming number of "blogs" are not actual blogs but SEO content farms. There's no regular readers of such things because there's no actual authors, just someone that took a job on Fivver to spew out some SEO garbage. Old content gets reposted almost verbatim because new results better according to Google.
The only reason these "blogs" exist is to show ads and hopefully get someone's e-mail (and implied consent) for a marke....newsletter.
It's at least half the business models of Food Network shows: aspirational kitchens and the people that live in them and also sometimes here's their recipes. (The other half being competitions, obviously.) I've got friends that could deliver entire doctoral theses on the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen (and its many YouTube shows and blogs) and the huge soap operatic drama of 2020's events where the entire brand milkshake ducked itself; falling into people's hearts as "feel good" entertainment early in 2020/the pandemic and then exploding very dramatically with revelations and betrayals that Fall.
Which isn't to say that there aren't garbage SEO farms out there in the food blogging space as well, but a lot of the big ones people commonly complain about seeing in google's results do have regular fans/audiences. (ETA: And many of the smaller blogs want to have regular fans/audiences. It's an active influencer/"content creator" space with relatively low barrier to entry that people love. Everyone's family loves food, it's a part of the human condition.)
A couple of browser add-ons specifically geared around trimming recipe pages down have been taken down due to similar complaints.
Like an article about some current event will undoubtedly begin with "when I was traveling ten years ago...".
> “Mere listings of ingredients as in recipes, formulas, compounds, or prescriptions are not subject to copyright protection. However, when a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection.”
That's ads. When mobile users have to scroll past 10 add, theyll click on some of them and make the blog money.
I continue to be curious about this kind of complaint. If all you want is a recipe list, without any of the fluff, why would you click on a link to a blog, rather than on a link to a recipe aggregator?
Foodie blogs exist specifically for the people who want a foodie discussion and not just an ingredients' list.
Is it because blogs tend to have better recipes overall? In that case, isn't there a bit of entitlement involved in asking that the author self-sacrificingly provides only the information that you want, without taking care of their own needs and wants, also?
To be honest, I don't follow recipes when I cook unless it's a dish I've never had before. At that point what I want is to understand the point of the dish. A list of ingredients and preparation instructions don't tell me what it's supposed to taste and smell like. The foodie blogs at least try to create a certain... feeling of place, I suppose, some kind of impression that guides you when you cook. I wouldn't say it always works but I appreciate the effort.
My real complaint with recipe writers is that they know how to cook one or two dishes well and they crib the rest off each other so even with all the information they provide, you still can't reliably cook a good meal from a recipe unless you've had the dish before. But that's my personal opinion.
If you want JUST recipes, pay money instead of just randomly googling around. America's test kitchen has a billion, vetted, and really good recipes. That solves that problem.
If you almost only plant wheat, you are going to end up with one hell of a pest problem.
If you almost only have Windows XP, you are going to have one hell of a virus problem.
If you almost only have SearchRank-style search engines (or just the one), you are going to have one hell of a content spam problem.
Even though they have some pretty dodgy incentives, I don't think google suffers quality problems because they are evil, I think ultimately they suffer because they're so dominant. Whatever they do, the spammers adapt almost instantly.
A diverse ecosystem on the other hand limits the viability of specialization by its very nature. If one actor is attacked, it shrinks and that reduces the opportunity for attacking it.
I also think a search engine like this would be quite hard to game. An ML-based classifier trained on thousands of text-heavy and media-heavy screenshots should be quite robust and I think would be very hard to evade, so the "game" will become more about how identify the crawler so you can serve it a high-ranking page while serving crap to the real users, and it seems fairly easily to defeat if the search engine does a second pass using residential proxies and standard browser user agents to detect this behavior (it could also threaten huge penalties like the entire domain being banned for a month to even deter attempts at this).
So just add human review to the mix, if a site is obviously trying to game the system (listicles, seo spam etc) just drop and ban them from the search index.