Yes, but interestingly (to me, at least), Google have modified their search engine crawler over many, many iterations so that what it values is the same as what a user would value.
When people would keyword stuff, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working.
When people would work on backlink farms, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working.
When price comparison search engines were all the rage, Google realised that if the "purchase" button led off-site, that was a marker that an intermediary was pushing the price up through affiliate schemes, so started to push those down in the rankings.
So now, the best way to create content for SEO is to think about what your ideal user would really want, because the two now align quite closely.
Opinion pieces, narratives, etc. all might make sense for regular readers but when a searcher is looking for something it's typically to get a job done, so Google ranks content that helps them get the job done.
Title: How to poach an egg that's easy for everyone
Content:
Are you looking for a way to poach an egg? We have found the easiest recipes for poached eggs anywhere and compiled them for you here. Don't worry, if you want the cleanest, mess-free way to simply poach an egg, this is how to poach an egg.
## Why would you want to poach an egg?
Poaching eggs is a delicious way to prepare eggs. You can poach eggs for breakfast, you can put poached eggs on toast, or make poached eggs for eggs benedicts. There are many simple and easy recipes for poached eggs.
etc. etc. etc.
with the actual instructions/recipes at the bottom.
This is particularly bad in the food/recipe space. I've wondered if it's for SEO or if it's to stretch the content length of a short recipe and allow more spots for ads.
Always heard it may have something to do with copyright. You can't copyright a recipe (in the list of instructions sense), but you can copyright original prose/content.
Adding this stuff presumably makes it trickier for other sites to scrape/copy the recipe automatically, and lets them take down those who left the 'original' content in.
Alternatively, might be because of stuff like Yoast. Those tools have a 'readability checker' which might not class a simple list of instructions as 'easily readable'.
> When price comparison search engines were all the rage, Google realised that if the "purchase" button led off-site, that was a marker that an intermediary was pushing the price up through affiliate schemes, so started to push those down in the rankings.
This hasn't gone away at all. Do a search for any "best X" and you'll find a slew of review websites for the best X which are stutfed with Amazon affiliate links.
It's virtually imoossible to find reviews of household items that are trustworthy. I've resorted to appending things like "reddit" and looking on eg /r/buyitforlife.
You kind of describe the reason I can’t get rid of Google.
Many people keep saying that DuckDuckGo is good enough. But no matter how hard I try use it for everything, always end up googling a few questions. Many times, Google knows what I’m looking for better than myself.
DuckDuckGo will let you prefix any query with "!g" and redirect that query to Google.
That was the feature that let me switch everything over to DDG. DDG works great for 80-85% of my search queries. For the others, I just prefix with "!g" because I suspect Google will give me better results.
When people would keyword stuff, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working.
When people would work on backlink farms, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working.
When price comparison search engines were all the rage, Google realised that if the "purchase" button led off-site, that was a marker that an intermediary was pushing the price up through affiliate schemes, so started to push those down in the rankings.
So now, the best way to create content for SEO is to think about what your ideal user would really want, because the two now align quite closely.
Opinion pieces, narratives, etc. all might make sense for regular readers but when a searcher is looking for something it's typically to get a job done, so Google ranks content that helps them get the job done.
I don't see what's sad about that.