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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

#71

Post by bentcorner »

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!

In the same way you can tell if a search result is "good", you can usually tell if what ChatGPT is telling you something truthful.

And you face the same problem when looking for something in a domain you are not an expert in - no way to tell if a web page is truthful and no way to tell if ChatGPT is right. ChatGPT just lets you make more mistakes more efficiently.

But for those cases where you kind of know the answer, ChatGPT is usually better than search.

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

#72

Post by DropInIn »

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.

You'd think that having a long history of content with traffic to said content over that time would be a key differentiator in ranking pages....

The issue here is very clearly with how Google et al are operating, effectively intentionally favoring blog spam over real content producers.

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

#73

Post by codedokode »

modeless wrote: post #65
slater wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not always smoke. If you have enough resources, you can make research and test hypothesis. Also, sometimes there are leaks, like a leak of Yandex source code, which disclosed what factors were used for ranking.

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

#74

Post by em-bee »

skissane wrote: post #54
flangola7 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One reason is if you keep all your old versions of product docs up, Google will randomly send people to the old version instead of the current one, and then customers will get confused by the outdated info I’m sure there must be some way to fix this with META tags/etc, but it is often easier just to delete the old stuff, than change the META tags on 100s or 1000s of legacy doc pages

but if i have an old version of the product, then i may need those old docs.

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

#75

Post by demizer »

pessimizer wrote: post #68

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?

Google is destroying the internet is a good way to put it. AD dollars are their only priority. I hope Google dies because of it.

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

#76

Post by barbariangrunge »

jzb wrote: post #29

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.

The real reason: hiding it from ai scrapers?

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

#77

Post by Xelbair »

kenjackson wrote: post #36
jzb wrote: post #29

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.

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?

simple. Split google's Ad part, with search part and chrome part.

Because it's clearly bullshit at this point.

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

#78

Post by pessimizer »

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?

Google is paying Wikipedia through "Wikimedia Enterprise." If Wikipedia weren't able to sucker people into thinking that they're poverty-stricken, Google would probably prop it up like they do Firefox.

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

#79

Post by em-bee »

Espionage724 wrote: post #41
LordShredda wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offloading trash to an already strained organisation. are they donating any help or is it just taking advantage of charity?

Lmao there's no winning with you people :p Don't worry, Wayback is capable of telling CNET where to go if they were really concerned. If anything they should be thankful for the newly-generated interest that a major company would use them instead of some randoms cherry-picking sites for arguments.

yes, this greatly legitimizes the wayback archive.

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

#80

Post by demizer »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #20

One of my favourite websites growing up: download.com

When download.com became infested with ad ware was a sad day. I used to visit that site a lot to see what cool software I could install. Thank the heavens for Linux for teaching me proper package management.
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