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While Google does seem to use engagement metrics to help with ranks I don't think it's as simple as you laid it out (which is fair you were likely oversimplifying for brevity). Google themselves have said just because you bounce quickly doesn't mean it's a bad result, could mean you found your answer and now you have another question based off of that.

My understanding from case studies I've read and tests I've seen done is 1) engagement metrics seem to be most useful at the top 5 rank positions in the search results 2) it's really hard to measure when improved engagement metrics actually improve ranks.

On the flipside adding content to a page usually results in fairly quick change in ranks and is relatively easy to track. And it makes sense. A normal recipe is a list of ingredients and an order/method to cook them. 100-300 words tops in most cases. Not a lot of info for a bot to understand what the context of the recipe is around.

Now if you spend another 750 words writing about how to do it Google gets a lot more context and reinforcement that what you're talking about is actually relevant. Keyword stuffing isn't a thing in that you can literally say the same word over and over and get higher ranks, but if you can stuff a post with relevant keywords sprinkled all over the place that's good enough for Google to say 'oh now I get what this page is about'.

So there may be some slight impact on engagement metrics (which is debatable since a lot of people find all that long text super annoying and will bounce because of it), it's the extra text/keywords that Google understands and values.