The first site "cookieandkate" might look like blogspam but it wasn't.
After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites.
[1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel.
[2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content.
Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda.
That's pretty depressing. I don't really do any kind of content marketing work these days and haven't really been around that industry for a decade, but I can only imagine how disappointing it must have been to start seeing your traffic drop off, seeing which results were winning in search compared to your own site, seeing how they were winning, and then having to add more and more shit to your own site in order to climb back up the rankings.
After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites.
[1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel.
[2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content.
Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda.
[1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandk...
[2]. https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandk...