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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

#91

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.

I think it has much more to do with Google gutting their own working algorithms than it does with SEO

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

#92
post #3

Funny timing, because Google said yesterday not to do this. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpfu...

That reads like an attempt at a refutation that is actually a confirmation:

> The page itself isn’t likely to rank well. Removing it might mean if you have a massive site that we’re better able to crawl other content on the site. But it doesn’t mean we go “oh, now the whole site is so much better” because of what happens with an individual page.

> “Just because Google says that deleting content in isolation doesn’t provide any SEO benefit, this isn’t always true" Which ... isn't what we said. We said that if people are deleting content just because they think old content is somehow bad that's -- again -- not a thing.

To me that reads like it is possible to improve the ranking of new content by deleting old content. The only thing they are refuting is that the age of the deleted content is the reason for the improvement.

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

#93
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.

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.

google shows ads not good content. let's hope those are more aligned in the future

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i use a tool for programming that's based on ChatGPT

i find it most helpful when i am not sure how to phrase a query so that direct search would find something. but i also found that in at least half the cases the answer is incomplete or even wrong.

the last one i remember explained in the text what functions or settings i could use in the text, but the code example that it presented did not do what the text suggested. it really drove home the point that these are just haphazardly assembled responses that sometimes get things right by pure chance.

with questions like yours i would be very careful to verify that the solution is actually correct.

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

#95
Google also might be at fault for making images on web lower quality. Several years ago, Google had announced that page load speed will affect the ranking. Google's tool, PageSpeed Insights gave recommendations on improving load speed. But it also recommended to lower quality of JPEG images to the level where artifacts would be visible. So instead of proper manual testing (using eyes, not a mathematical formula) on a large set of images, some Google employee simply wrote a recommended compression level out of their head and this forced web masters to worsen the quality of the images below any acceptable level.

So it doesn't matter if the photographer or illustrator worked hard to make a beautiful image, Google's robotic decision based on some lifeless mathematical formula crossed out their efforts.

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

#96
post #90
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What a fantasy. It does not show any sign of profit decrease. How would a company die with $279.8B revenue, steadily increasing yearly?

I suspect that the revenue increases have more to do with the addition of new users in developing markets rather than actual value added. Once all potential users have been reached, Google will have to actually improve their product.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as that linked guide explains, that's only relevant for sites with e.g. over a million pages changing once a week . That's for stuff like large e-commerce sites with constantly changing product info. Google is clear that if your content doesn't change often (in the way that news articles don't), then crawl budget is irrelevant.

To determine whether content changes Google has to spend budget as well, hasn't it? So it has to fetch that 20-years old article.

If the content is literally the same, the crawler should be able to use If-Modified-Since, right? It still has to make a HTTP request, but not parse or index anything.

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

#98

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?

I'll just assume you neglected to read TFA, because if you had, you would have discovered that it links to an official Google source that states CNET shouldn't be doing this.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800

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

#99

Google also might be at fault for making images on web lower quality. Several years ago, Google had announced that page load speed will affect the ranking. Google's tool, PageSpeed Insights gave recommendations on improving load speed. But it also recommended to lower quality of JPEG images to the level where artifacts would be visible. So instead of proper manual testing (using eyes, not a mathematical formula) on a…

That also explains why 2000s-era postage-stamp size photos are now back in vogue.

When it comes to Google, sufficiently-advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.

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

#100
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And you're probably out of support and aren't a current paying customer so you're a lower priority than current customers that want current information. (Old information is often available on product support sites but it probably won't come up with a random search.)
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