The effects of this are easiest to see with online recipes; the highest ranking recipes are all thousand word ramblings with a recipe tacked on at the end. Google sees you spent more time on the site (i.e. wasted scrolling) and thinks you were more 'engaged.'
I noticed this too and made a plugin that saves me a lot of time; it copies the recipe into a container and puts it in a modal at the top of the page with original formatting intact.
> Google sees you spent more time on the site (i.e. wasted scrolling) and thinks you were more 'engaged.'
That seems specious. By that reasoning we could predict long form articles would triumph over short ones, but that doesn't bear out.
It seems just as plausible that there's a population of readers that do like those terrible rambling stories and tend to be more loyal to a site if they do, vs a large population who will just click on whatever recipes show up at the top of the search results with a reasonable sounding recipe name.
Recipe sites also rip each other off all the time, and it would be difficult to tell where the authoritative source of a recipe was. The personal story part is harder to rip off without being caught as a scraper (and may then boost your SEO prospects).
That was an explanation of why long articles that don't have recipes at the end aren't consistently ranked higher than short articles that don't have recipes at the end.
You don't care about how that cookie recipe that only uses four ingredients changed their whole live and how their children just love it and the whole office goes nuts when they bring them in?
Yeah I don't either, I just wanna know how to make the damn cookie.
