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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

#61

Post by azlev »

flangola7 wrote: post #37
ghaff wrote: post #31

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engines solve the issue automagically, there are a lot of reasons why organizations want to reduce they amount of old/outdated/stale information that's served to searchers.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).

What reasons would there to be to delete old new articles? My inner historian is screaming.

Deleting old articles ease the burden to manage it.

There are infrastructure costs and manage costs.

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

#62

Post by jesprenj »

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…

They could specify in the sitemap how often do old articles change. Or set a indefinite caching header.

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

#64

Post by qingcharles »

sydbarrett74 wrote: post #6
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…

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.'

You can't (currently) search the Wayback Machine, so you can only find these old articles if you know what the URL once was.

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

#65

Post by modeless »

slater wrote: post #40
kenjackson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who says this is actually improving their ranking? SEO is smoke and mirrors. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole exercise was actually counterproductive for them, and they just don't realize it.

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

#66

Post by em-bee »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #26
burnhamup wrote: post #15

Earlier 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?

the ads are different.

i am tracking rss feeds of many sites, and on some i get notifications for old articles because something irrelevant in the page changed.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

tedunangst wrote: post #42
burnhamup wrote: post #15

Earlier 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…

How does Wikipedia manage to remain indexed?

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by pessimizer »

So google's shitty search now economically incentivizes sites to destroy information.

Can there be any doubt that Google destroyed the old internet by becoming a bad search engine? Could their exclusion of most of the web be considered punishment for being sites being so old and stable that they don't rely on Google for ad revenue?

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

#69

Post by selcuka »

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!

Well, you say that flippantly, but if you ask it correctly, in most cases the answer is correct as well. You should obviously double check the solution, but that applies to anything, be it a Google search or a Wikipedia article.

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

#70

Post by choppaface »

slater wrote: post #40
kenjackson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope nope too busy on Bard and making cookies more favorable to Adsense https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-third-party-cookies/

And if the content isn't shared somewhere (typically on a non-Google property), then is it even relevant anymore? All the Googlers who defined search relevance outside of freshness have left to other opportunities.

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