A text message comes in from a friend asking what banana bread recipe she should make and my gut response is to direct her to LMGTFY.com—until I realize that Googling best banana bread recipe will still yield over 4 million loaves claiming to be just that.
In this maelstrom of recipes that all market themselves as exactly what you're looking for, it can feel like there's no way to know which way is up and which way is down. Which recipe will yield something tender and cakey versus dry and bland? Does softened butter versus melted butter make a difference? How about the number of eggs? Or their temperature?
So I searched for six loaves, every one of which has best in its title, and then took them at their word, just as my friend might do if she slogged through Google for a recipe.
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's Best-Ever Banana Bread, and Martha Stewart's The Best Banana Bread looked different and, in what will surprise no one, they tasted different, too. They certainly weren't all the best. In our blind taste test, two loaves received no votes at all.
How did we get to this place, where a word that is intended to narrow down the options, to skim the truly great from the mediocre, is no longer a good-enough descriptor? And when—if ever—can we still trust it?
We're in what Eben Thurston, currently the Director of S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) at Fareportal, calls an S.E.O. echo chamber. Because of the sheer number of search results for banana bread, the playing field is extremely competitive. By throwing best into the title tag (a piece of HTML that's critical to SEO) and the headline, Thurston explained, websites can enter a smaller pool, with fewer direct competitors. And while more specific keywords (best banana bread recipe as compared to banana bread recipe as compared to banana bread) attract a smaller volume of searchers, those searchers are more specific in their desires and may be more likely to convert (that is, click).
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In other words, we lookers are using the word best to narrow in on great recipes in an overcrowded landscape; websites are tagging with the word best because we're searching for it. That leaves us running in a circle, hungry hamsters on a wheel.
A smaller blogger who does any amount of S.E.O. research and is trying to work with Google, Thurston said, would look at a keyword data tool and see that best banana bread is a top-searched keyword with more room for entry than the vaster, wilder banana bread.
Andie Mitchell has been blogging for over six years and avoids the superlative best in her recipe titles even though there's a lot of pressure to call something that. While it's attention grabbing and definitive, and that’s helpful in a sea of millions of recipes, the gravity of the word scares her. Still, she pays attention to S.E.O. when naming nonetheless: I’ve gotten a lot wiser about how crucial it is to name my recipes with keywords and keyword phrases that people are searching for, she wrote to me. She uses Google AdWords Keyword Planner to compare how many people are searching for the phrase with how many results it yields.
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When I asked Deb Perelman, who has made Smitten Kitchen an incredibly successful blog over the course of ten years, for her thoughts on why superlatives like best and easiest exist and with such frequency, she wrote back, It's all S.E.O., right?
But it's not just smaller bloggers who are concerned with S.E.O. when it comes to naming recipes (and recipe collections): In a time when nearly every major food publication must be concerned with print
's Executive Food Editor, recipes were not titled with best (and its superlative brethren: ultimate, easiest, fastest, perfect) until it became necessary for S.E.O. purposes.
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In print, the best has been historically viewed, according to food stylist and recipe developer Susan Spungen, as a a cop-out. In her twelve years as the founding Editorial Director for food and entertaining at
Magazine, she thought of the best as a naming convention to be avoided (and one that she was never tempted to use). And in Sarah Copeland's three-plus years as
, explained to me that many of the recipe collections on the website will be called the best (like 12 Best Slow Cooker Recipes) even if the recipe titles themselves do not include the superlative. Those are not the most-searched or the most highly-rated: Those are the twelve recipes with the best pictures. It's a common S.E.O. practice, one that's oftentimes behind the scenes at , as well.
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Competition for online traffic and S.E.O. has really made a lot of people—professionals and amateur cooks and bakers—start to throw that term [best] around.
Copeland suspects that this best arms race coincided, at least partially, with the rise of aggregators like Allrecipes: When a home cook, someone who had been told their cake had been the best cake ever at all their block parties could upload a recipe and call it the best, even if it was just for a personal annotation, it became sort of this, well, if she says hers is the best, how will ours get any traffic if ours isn't also the best? Competition for online traffic and S.E.O. has really made a lot of people—professionals and amateur cooks and bakers—start to throw that term around.
, Ujlaki recalls being given a whole host of descriptors, language that [the S.E.O. team] felt was obviously going to be the most successful for us to use because it's certainly not how we would normally speak and certainly not how we would characterize or sell our recipes.
Flour Bakery's Famous Banana Bread
For food publications born on the internet (rather than branches off magazine trees), S.E.O.-conscious titles are not as alien-feeling. In the words of Serious Eats' Managing Culinary Director (and The Food Lab author) J. Kenji López-Alt, you almost always want to include some sort of descriptive adjective—best, foolproof, quick and easy to make your recipes stand out in the search results.
“I would tell you right off the bat the Best Headline is not a formula for good S.E.O., ” Brian Lam, who runs The Wirecutter and The Sweethome, websites that rate gadgets and home gear for people who don’t want to spend a lot of time looking, wrote to me in an email. “It's not that simple.” Ultimately, “we [at The Wirecutter] don’t really pay attention to S.E.O., ” he said. “We just do awesome work and Google recognizes that because that is their job and they do it well.”
What does that mean? That out of the thousands of recipes on the web tagged best banana bread, only a handful are published by sites deemed authorities—in Lam's words, doing awesome work—in the eyes of Google.
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These, Thurston said, will typically outrank everyone else, even other websites that claim [their own recipe] to be the best. Websites with more backlinks (that is, referrals from other sites) and more powerful domains (like AllRecipes.com and Food.com) are ranked more highly in search results (with Google giving them, as Thurston said, extra credit). A newborn blog, even if it calls its banana bread the best healthy, fast, and easy banana bread recipe, in the world, of all time cannot compete.
And yet we continue to wave it. For fear that if everyone else is waving it, we might as well, too. It's a default modifier that, because everyone is using, no one cannot.
But best is especially relevant to dishes so classic you've already seen and tasted many versions: It's a way for publications to publish iconic recipes that feel neither redundant or contrived.
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We'll do pumpkin pie, but only if it's the best pumpkin pie in the entire world. That's a response Erin McDowell, a food stylist, recipe developer, and frequent contributor, might receive from a client if she's pitching a recipe that doesn't introduce a new twist or ingredient or technique. Posing a recipe as the very best, she thinks, is a way that a publication can publish recipes that are more basic, because does the world need another pumpkin pie recipe? They do if it’s the world’s best.
But who judges whether something is the world's best? Since the superlative is so widely applied across publications and blogs of all calibers, and with no consistency, it can be hard to know: The amount of research and testing conducted, the number of tasters consulted (teams of editors; a group of reader-volunteers; one writer)—all of that differs widely from source to source.
Recalls putting her foot down every single time she was encouraged to give a recipe a click-worthy name. We would only deploy that superlative if we
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Felt it. It's this sort of editorial discretion—and the knowledge that using best puts that publication's reputation on the line—that frequently determines which recipes receive the title. The BA's Best project at
, which is a collection of essential recipes to master, was pulled together from staff polls, cookbook research, expert and chef consultation, and test kitchen experimentation.
At other sites, testing may be
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