> The worst part is that it worked and they earned a lot of money from it.

This is the crux of the answer. The reason why recipe sites are full of garbage? Because it is effective and profitable.

This is also the reason why most food is full of garbage.

And as a result google search in general has been going downhill for the last 5 years. It's getting so bad, that I've openly been trying other search engines. Unfurtunately, duckduckgo has the same problem. I'm keeping an eye out for other search engines to do most of my searches.

I wonder how Google would respond to a site that had a big arrow pointing to that text with a "This is just to quiet google. Click here to jump the the recipe."

I think it would get reported by your competitors and then blacklisted/penalized after manual review.

Yet another reason the search monopoly we find ourselves in is so harmful. If there were even 2 or 3 search engines with substantial (20%+) market share SEO would have to try to triangulate for multiple competing measures of page quality - hopefully landing on something that resembles a passable user experience. Instead everyone in SEO is laser-focused on the singular quirks of Google's Page Rank.

If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below?

Yes. I worked at a site that had an SEO-obsessed boss and basically the keywords, placement of keywords, formatting of the page, everything...all affected SEO.

However, that all likely paled in comparison to him gaming the system by paying to host separate sites that linked back to his in an effort to boost legitimacy during the times when SEO was a make or break thing.

The more I read about SEO, the more dystopian it sounds.

"Please, I'll write whatever you want. Just list me!"

It's definitely an arms race. Sort of like tax avoidance. As long as you have search engines ordering results, I guess you'll have people who seek to game the results. The question for me is whether what Google does can be improved upon. I think we can do much better.

That only covers backlinks and authority, it's just one piece of the puzzle. Ironically, that's called a "black-hat" way of obtaining backlinks and authority. The "white-hat" way is to go to legit websites and purchase links, literally pay them to link your website. This is a great example of what's considered "ethical" in SEO

> If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below?

From an SEO perspective, yes.

Time spent on page will be less if the recipe is on the top.

A better measure as to whether the user found what they were looking for would be if Google checked if the user continues browsing through subsequent search results or not.

Google does check this. It’s called bounce rate and is just one piece of the SEO puzzle. Keeping users on your site longer before they “bounce” is another, so these sites are incentivized to keep you on the page for as long as possible because they know that it’s unlikely for a user to find the exact recipe they are looking for.

Such bs. I rarely spend more than 20s on a recipe page anyways. I scroll quickly to find ingredients box and thats it. Done...

At this level of optimization even the 0.25s spent scrolling past a story is enough to make a difference... this is like "competitive swimmers shaving off their body hair" level SEO.

...How do you follow the recipe? Or are we talking simple recipes where the steps are simple?

For me, at least, I typically don't follow the recipe. Very rarely am I looking for cooking instruction. I'm familiar enough with most typical cooking techniques that ingredient list and proportions, plus sometimes a quick glance at the steps, is all I need to get the job done. I'm usually modifying the ingredients on the fly as I cook the dish anyway.

When I am looking for cooking instruction, I find my existing library of trusted cookbooks to have a much better signal to noise ratio than Googled recipes sites on the web.

I wish there were some “intermediate” websites for cooking. There seems to be a missing middle, where I don’t know exactly to do, but know enough basics to only meed a little bit of direction.

Ie, not step by step, but more general. Let me improvise, but still guide me.

Placing recipes on the bottom and behind “click to show” type features forces users to remain on your site for a longer period of time. This makes it appear to Google that users are more “engaged” on your website because it takes longer for them to bounce in the cases where the recipe isn’t what they are looking for.

I do front-end dev for a high-volume recipe site and our multivariate tests mostly confirm the opposite. Simpler pages rank higher (and users report higher satisfaction with the product). Core Web Vitals changed the way a lot of things work, how long ago were you given this advice?

A while back (two years?). The thing is, user were extremely satisfied by the product. The users came to the website for a comparison table (which was at the top), used the information, clicked a link on the table and then exited the website. The rest of the page was useless, most won't even scroll. But still they needed it for a ton of SEO reasons (keyword density, semantic structure and complexity, internal and external linking). The company was working on an extremely competitive niche and it was crushing it (multi-million dollar ad revenue), so I think they knew what were doing.