Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmurray | Hacker News Reader

I love the way there are 10 competing folk explanations for "why are recipe pages online so long?"

Spending time on the page should actually be a great proxy for usefulness on recipe websites. If it's a long page of introduction and anecdotes, maybe it took me three minutes instead of one to reject it as unpromising. If it's the recipe I actually used, however, that tab is going to be open for the next thirty minutes or more.

View on HN

Are there really 10 different explanations?

I’ve seen “they’re long so there’s more space for ads” and “they’re long so you spend more time there so it doesn’t get penalised by google”, and to me those are pretty closely related.

There's also the "recipes aren't copyrightable, but the fluff about grandma baking cookies is" explanation.

I see that one a lot and it doesn't hold up to scrutiny because copyright on grandma isn't how recipe websites make their money. They trade in a generic field flooded with fly-by-nights that exist exclusively to run ads. They don't care nor need to care whether their filler material isn't copied.

I've also seen "the recipe itself isn't copyrightable, so they add prose/filler that is".

It happened when Google Penguin was rolled out, because Penguin’s claimed focus was on better content itself to combat backlink spam practices that abused PageRank descendants. It sort of worked but there were entire valuable websites with great content (but according to Penguin comprised of non-rich content) that were dropped pages deep into the search results. Recipe websites were among these. There exist reams of articles on how to fix your content to get Penguin to like it, and the buried recipe nonsense started exactly at the same time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin

But why would staying long on a web site correctly indicate the page provided the answer? Is you spent a short amount it could also indicate you found what you were looking for, and off you went.

That's the neat part: it doesn't!

It's a situation where Google doesn't benefit much more from it being the actual answer, and the site doesn't either.

In the long run it could have an impact on the user perception, that could be nullified by the page still staying ranked higher than the competiting pages and the user finding nowhere else better.

And how would google know if you didn't make another request

Google Analytics or Google Chrome telemetry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com