While it would be nice to believe that search engines solve the issue automagically, there are a lot of reasons why organizations want to reduce they amount of old/outdated/stale information that's served to searchers. I know where I work, we're constantly deleting older material (at least for certain types of content--which news and quasi-news pubs doesn't necessarily fall into).
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
#32[deleted]
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#33I 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…
From the article: 'Stories slated to be “deprecated” are archived using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and authors are alerted at least 10 days in advance, according to the memo.'
Offloading trash to an already strained organisation. are they donating any help or is it just taking advantage of charity?
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#34I've seen a couple news sources that are altering their publish dates to show near the top of news feeds. Google will announce "3 hours old", despite being weeks old.
Reddit does this and it's very frustrating
Wow, I thought that was just me. The elation of googling for a niche Reddit topic and finding one very recent only to reach that sad realization that the content is 11y old and likely not relevant anymore.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#35That'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!
I have been recently forking off a subproject from Git repo. After spending a lot of time messing around with it and getting into a lot of unforeseen trouble, I finally asked ChatGPT how to do it and of course ChatGPT knew the correct answer all along. I felt like an idiot. Now I always ask ChatGPT first. These LLMs are way smarter than you would think.
GPT4 with WolframAlpha plugin even gave me enough information to implement Taylor polynomial approximation for Gaussian function (don't ask why I needed that), which would have otherwise taken me hours of studying if I could even solve it at all.
PS: GPT4 somehow knows even things that are really hard to find online. I recently needed standard error but not of mean but rather of standard deviation. GPT4 not only understood my vague query but gave me formula that is really hard to find online even if you already know the keywords. I know it's hard to find, because I went ahead to double-check ChatGPT's answer via search.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#36This 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.
In fairness to them. If one of their top ways of getting traffic is being marked as less relevant because of older articles, what do you want them to do? Just continue to lose money because Google can't rank them appropriately?
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#37While it would be nice to believe that search engines solve the issue automagically, there are a lot of reasons why organizations want to reduce they amount of old/outdated/stale information that's served to searchers. I know where I work, we're constantly deleting older material (at least for certain types of content--which news and quasi-news pubs doesn't necessarily fall into).
What reasons would there to be to delete old new articles?
My inner historian is screaming.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#38One of my favourite websites growing up: download.com
Same. I was a kid in the country, so we didn't have internet. I used to ride my bike with my thumb drive to the library's computers to see what was new on download.com at least once a week. It was like visiting a candy store. It's a shame those days are over.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That's a good point about the static nature of some pages. Is there any way to tell a crawler to crawl this page, but after this date don't crawl again, but keep anything you previously crawled.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#40This 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.
In fairness to them. If one of their top ways of getting traffic is being marked as less relevant because of older articles, what do you want them to do? Just continue to lose money because Google can't rank them appropriately?
Or mayhap Google et al could realize and understand that having old articles in archive shouldn't penalize your ranking.