SEO is so broken, it's not about website content or website quality. It's about how much money you pay to some punks - "SEO experts" who are hacking a system. I'm so sick of that.
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One day Google may introduce multiple search rankings, where one of them is SEO and another is the "useful things". But I don't hold my breath.
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.
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.