[Nextgrid]

I doubt it. A lot of SEO drivel appears easy to detect - recipes for example.

Recipes would ultimately be a list of ingredients, concise instructions and maybe a picture or two. It should be trivial to train a classifier to detect SEO spam in this context.

I think Google doesn't really have an incentive to do this, as SEO spam typically includes ads which can contain Google ads or analytics/Google Tag Manager which helps Google, thus prioritizing better results would work against their bottom line.

[jehb]

> Recipes would ultimately be a list of ingredients, concise instructions and maybe a picture or two.

So, if Google altered their algorithm such that "recipe" content had to be shorter-form in order to perform better in SERPs, how would this change anything? The sites that profit from search traffic would be the ones with their fingers on the pulse of the algorithm, and the resources to instantly alter their content in order to ensure that they continued to rank for the terms that were driving traffic.

[Nextgrid]

Well, if Google ranks user-friendly content higher then sites will either adjust to be more user-friendly or get outranked by new sites that are user-friendly. The user wins.