FOOD NEWS
What A Recipe's Long-Winded Intro Can Tell You About Its Quality
By Elias Nash
Search engines have allowed blogs to become the primary cooking resource for many, and nearly all of these sites preface their recipes with long intros. These rambling blocks of text often infuriate cooks who want to get to the point, but while some intros are useless, others are useful, and understanding the difference can tell you a lot about the recipe itself.
A blog needs to rank high in Google search results if it wants any viewership, so people will use SEO (search engine optimization) to push their website further up the rankings. Google's algorithm prioritizes pages with more text, and while SEO may be the driving force behind long recipe intros, what really matters is how the writer achieves that high word count.
If a writer puts great thought into their introduction, they've probably done the same with the recipe itself which should give you confidence in the recipe. Beware of intros that only focus on SEO by repeating terms or keyword-stuffing, and intros that simply rephrase parts of the recipe itself, as this means the writer doesn't have enough valuable information to fill their intro.