[magicalist]

> 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).

[jackpirate]

No one scrolls to the end of a long form article to get a recipe. Instead, they just close the tab and say "too long; didn't read."

Your other point are good though.

[RussianCow]

> No one scrolls to the end of a long form article to get a recipe.

I highly doubt this is true. Scrolling to the bottom of a page is a very low cost to pay for a recipe.

[daveFNbuck]

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.

[RussianCow]

Ah, I see how I completely misread that. Thanks for clarifying!