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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

#131

Post by bagacrap »

pavon wrote: post #92
skilled wrote: 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 p…

Which is a pretty crucial distinction, no? No one would get upset if CNET announced they were deleting clickbait and blogspam.

With articles such as "The Best Home Deals from Urban Outsitters' Fall Forward Sale" currently gracing their front page, I'm wondering how long HN commenters expect to need access to this content.

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

#132

Post by SahAssar »

bagacrap wrote: post #123
farnarkle wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only says that Google discourages such actions, not that such actions are not beneficial to SEO ranking (which is equal to the aforementioned economic incentive in this case).

So whose word do we have to go on that this is beneficial, besides anonymous "SEO experts" and CNET leadership (those paragons of journalistic savvy)? Perhaps what CNET really means is that they're deleting old low quality content with high bounce rates. After all, the best SEO is actually having the thing users want.

In my experience SEO experts are the most superstitious tech people I ever met. One guy wanted me to reorder HTTP header fields to match another site. He wanted our minified HTML to include a linebreak just after a certain meta element just because some other site had it. I got requests to match variable names in minified JS just because googles own minified JS had that name.

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

#133

Post by meragrin_ »

farnarkle wrote: post #111
bagacrap wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That only says that Google discourages such actions, not that such actions are not beneficial to SEO ranking (which is equal to the aforementioned economic incentive in this case).

> That only says that Google discourages such actions

Nope. It says that Google does not ding you for old content.

"Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!"

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

#134

Post by samtp »

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?

Move the articles to archived.cnet.com or cnetarchive.com instead of just deleting them

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

#135

Post by 88913527 »

kccqzy wrote: post #108
bagacrap wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is another problem of the entire SEO industry. Websites trust these SEO consultants and growth hackers more than they trust information from Google itself. Somehow, it becomes widely accepted that the best information on Google ranking is from those third parties but not Google.

It could be premature to place fault with the SEO industry. Think about the incentives: Google puts articles out, but an SEO specialist might have empirical knowledge from working for a various number of web properties. It's not that I wouldn't trust Google's articles, but specialists might have discovered undocumented methods for giving a boost.

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

#137

Post by ericd »

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?

Your site isn’t worthy of the same crawl budget as Wikipedia.

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

#138

Post by notatoad »

farnarkle wrote: post #111
bagacrap wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That only says that Google discourages such actions, not that such actions are not beneficial to SEO ranking (which is equal to the aforementioned economic incentive in this case).

it seems incredibly short-sighted to assume that just because these actions might possibly give you a small bump in SEO right now, they won't have long-term consequences.

if CNET deletes all their old articles, they're making a situation where most links to CNET from other sites lead to error pages (or at least, pages with no relevant content on them) and even if that isn't currently a signal used by google, it could become one.

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

#139

Post by meragrin_ »

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…

> It baffles me why this would be successful SEO -- and assuming that it actually isn't, it baffles me why CNET thinks it would be.

If the content deleted is garbage, why wouldn't it help? No clue on CNET's overall quality, but I don't have a favorable image of it. Just had a look at their main page and that did not do it any favors.

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

#140

Post by weird-eye-issue »

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?

They could just noindex them.
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