> I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe?
> My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc?
Cookbooks that sell well usually have some introductory text for every recipe. The best cookbooks use this intro to describe unusual techniques or flavor combinations in the recipe, so the intro text in such books can be really helpful and is sometimes critical to getting the recipe right the first time you try to make it. The only cookbook I own that doesn't have intro text for each recipe is a culinary school textbook, so the authors felt safe assuming a certain level of familiarity with the terms and techniques used.
OG food blogs like Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz emulated the classic cookbook style, and, not surprisingly, those authors have gone on to make a lot of money writing traditional cookbooks. Contemporary food blogs tend to try to emulate older, successful blogs (maybe because Google somehow boosted recipes with intro text back when such text was usually helpful?) but mostly come off as AI-generated garbage text, made just long enough to create a couple scroll events and artificially lower a site's bounce rate.
> My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc?
Cookbooks that sell well usually have some introductory text for every recipe. The best cookbooks use this intro to describe unusual techniques or flavor combinations in the recipe, so the intro text in such books can be really helpful and is sometimes critical to getting the recipe right the first time you try to make it. The only cookbook I own that doesn't have intro text for each recipe is a culinary school textbook, so the authors felt safe assuming a certain level of familiarity with the terms and techniques used.
OG food blogs like Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz emulated the classic cookbook style, and, not surprisingly, those authors have gone on to make a lot of money writing traditional cookbooks. Contemporary food blogs tend to try to emulate older, successful blogs (maybe because Google somehow boosted recipes with intro text back when such text was usually helpful?) but mostly come off as AI-generated garbage text, made just long enough to create a couple scroll events and artificially lower a site's bounce rate.