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CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

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Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

#21

Post by SoftTalker »

crazygringo wrote: post #7

Is there any evidence this would even work? Surely Google determines "fresh, relevant" content according to whatever has recently been published, which this doesn't change. If anything, doesn't Google consider sites with a long history of content with tons of inbound links as more authoritative and therefore higher-ranked? This baffles me. It baffles me why this would be successful SEO -- and assuming that it actuall…

Perhaps sites with a small ratio of new:total content would be downranked --- but I really don't think that makes sense because that's going to be the case for any long-established site.

Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

#22

Post by nevi-me »

burnhamup wrote: post #15
crazygringo wrote: post #7

Is there any evidence this would even work? Surely Google determines "fresh, relevant" content according to whatever has recently been published, which this doesn't change. If anything, doesn't Google consider sites with a long history of content with tons of inbound links as more authoritative and therefore higher-ranked? This baffles me. It baffles me why this would be successful SEO -- and assuming that it actuall…

The theory I've heard is related to 'crawl budget'. Google is only going to devote a finite amount of time to indexing your site. If the number of articles on your site exceeds that time, some portion of your site won't be indexed. So by 'pruning' undesirable pages, you might boost attention on the articles you want indexed. No clue how this ends up working in practice. Google's suggestion isn't to delete pages, but…

It could be better to opt those articles out of the crawler. Unless that's more effort. If articles included the year and month in the URL prefix, I would disallow /201* instead.

Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

#26

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

burnhamup wrote: post #15
crazygringo wrote: post #7

Is there any evidence this would even work? Surely Google determines "fresh, relevant" content according to whatever has recently been published, which this doesn't change. If anything, doesn't Google consider sites with a long history of content with tons of inbound links as more authoritative and therefore higher-ranked? This baffles me. It baffles me why this would be successful SEO -- and assuming that it actuall…

The theory I've heard is related to 'crawl budget'. Google is only going to devote a finite amount of time to indexing your site. If the number of articles on your site exceeds that time, some portion of your site won't be indexed. So by 'pruning' undesirable pages, you might boost attention on the articles you want indexed. No clue how this ends up working in practice. Google's suggestion isn't to delete pages, but…

Even if that rule were true, why wouldn’t everything in the say, top NNN internet sites get an exemption? It is the Internet’s most hit content, why would it not be exhaustively indexed?

Alternatively, other than ads, what is changing on a CNN article from 10 years ago? Why would that still be getting daily scans?

Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

#27

Post by barbariangrunge »

JRKrause wrote: post #19
loandbehold wrote: post #9

That's what I moved to ChatGPT4 for most of my info queries. Google is badly compromised by SEO. Plus ChatGPT4 gives answer right away within having to go through multiple results and search within each page for specific line I need.

Right there with you. I've gotten so used to having it give me exactly the answer to my specific question that, when I must fall back to traditional search, it's noticeably unpleasant.

Gpt always an answer for you. Even if it’s made up!

Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

#28

Post by 6510 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #14
loandbehold wrote: post #9

That's what I moved to ChatGPT4 for most of my info queries. Google is badly compromised by SEO. Plus ChatGPT4 gives answer right away within having to go through multiple results and search within each page for specific line I need.

Heck, sometimes that answer is even correct!

Think of it like floating point logic.

Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

#29

Post by jzb »

This is some bullshit. It’s bad enough that a lot of sites with content going back 10-20 years have linkrot or have simply gone offline. But I am at a loss for words that they’re disappearing content on purpose just for SEO rankings.

If this is what online publishing has come to we have seriously screwed up.

Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

#30

Post by jzb »

Espionage724 wrote: post #4

I haven't visited a CNET page in years and didn't know they were even still relevant :p The times I have visited CNET pages in the past was to find specific information. If such information happens to be in deleted articles, that would reduce my interactions with CNET in the future. I think they should archive the old articles or even offload them to Wayback willingly, but it's possible some of the articles they're p…

Article says that’s what they’re doing. It says exactly that.

Doesn’t really make things better, IMO, but they are at least doing that.

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