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

Post by magicalist » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 12:43 AM UTC

agrajag wrote: post #129

bagacrap wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google actually describes an entirely plausible mechanism of action here at [1]. old content slows down site crawling, which can cause new content to not be refreshed as often. Sure, one page doesn’t matter, but thousands will. [1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129...

Post by 1letterunixname » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 12:46 AM UTC

laweijfmvo wrote: post #13

petee wrote: post #5

I'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.

Yup, "Last Updated on xxx" but no obvious updates called out in the article

Post by chaostheory » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 12:54 AM UTC

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.

Post by selfhoster11 » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 12:56 AM UTC

joshuahaglund wrote: post #120

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?

Aren't they both doing the economically incentivized thing tho? Are you saying maybe some things should be beyond economic incentives?

Post by linkjuice4all » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 1:00 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #56

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…

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.