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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

#191

Post by water-your-self »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #161
whyenot wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it is so cut and dried. Who is more likely to give you accurate information on how to game Google's ranking: Google themselves, or an SEO firm. I suspect that Google has far less incentive to provide good information on this than an SEO firm would.

Google will give you advice on how to not be penalized by Google. They won’t give you advice on how to game the system in your favor. The more Google helps you get ahead, the more you end up dominating the search results. The more you dominate the results, the more people will start thinking to come straight to you. The more people come straight to you, the more people never use Google. The less people use Google, th…

Search heremetically provides a very small amount of profits. Google makes most of its money on the websites it surfaces via ads.

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

#192

Post by water-your-self »

chongli wrote: post #143
zx8080 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think the theory of Google's death is that they are "killing the golden goose." The idea is that they are killing off all the independent websites on the internet. That is, all the sites besides Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/NetFlix/Reddit/etc. that people access directly (either through an app or a bookmark) and which (barring Reddit) block GoogleBot anyway. These are all the sites (like CNET) that Google indexes whi…

Directs traffic away not to generate revenue but to generate revenue faster this quarter in time for the report. They could make billions without liquifying the internet but they would make billions slowly

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

#193

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

magicalist wrote: post #151
agrajag wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It says it doesn't affect ranking and their quote tweet is even more explicit https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689297947740295168

This is the actual quote from Google PR:

>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.

Parsing this carefully, to me it sounds worded to give the impression removing old pages won’t help the ranking of other pages without explicitly saying so. In other words, if it turns out that deleting old pages helps your ranking (indirectly, by making Google crawl your new pages faster), this tweet is truthful on a technicality.

In the context of negative attention where some of the blame for old content being removed is directed toward Google, there is a clear motive for a PR strategy that deflects in this way.

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

#194

Post by tlogan »

bagacrap wrote: post #98
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?

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

Google says so many things about SEO which are not true. There are some rules which are 100% true and some which they just hope their AI thinks they are true.

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

#195

Post by Dalewyn »

SahAssar wrote: post #132
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.

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.

>our minified HTML

Unreadable source code is a crime against humanity.

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

#196

Post by ghaff »

skissane wrote: post #187
ghaff wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for product documentation for version n-2.x, it's easy enough to see the use case for why a customer might need it. (e.g. they have some other product that's version locked to it) But there is a ton of collateral, videos, etc. that companies produce that get stale, musty, or just plain wrong and if you leave them all out there it's just a mess that's now up to the customer to decide what's right, what's mostly ri…

> But there is a ton of collateral, videos, etc. that companies produce that get stale, musty, or just plain wrong That 2017 product roadmap slide saying "we'll deliver X version N+1 by 2020" gets a bit embarrassing when 2023 rolls around and it is still nowhere to be seen. Maybe the real answer is "X wasn't making enough money so the new version was cancelled", but you don't want to publicly announce that (what will…

Or your 2011 presentation about cloud computing didn't mention containers. I'm not sure it's embarrassing any more than a zillion other forward looking crystal ball glimpses is embarrassing. But there's no real reason to keep on your site unless your intent is to provide a view into technology's twisty path or the various false starts every company makes with its products.

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

#197

Post by pmontra »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #161
whyenot wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it is so cut and dried. Who is more likely to give you accurate information on how to game Google's ranking: Google themselves, or an SEO firm. I suspect that Google has far less incentive to provide good information on this than an SEO firm would.

Google will give you advice on how to not be penalized by Google. They won’t give you advice on how to game the system in your favor. The more Google helps you get ahead, the more you end up dominating the search results. The more you dominate the results, the more people will start thinking to come straight to you. The more people come straight to you, the more people never use Google. The less people use Google, th…

> The more you dominate the results, the more people will start thinking to come straight to you.

This is a possible outcome but there are people that type in google.com and then the name of their preferred news site, their bank, etc, every day.

The site with the name they search dominates that search but they keep searching it.

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

#198

Post by havnagiggle »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #181
Dalewyn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because someone says water isn't wet doesn't mean water isn't wet.

The contrived problem of trusting authority can be easily resolved by trusting authority

Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

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

#199

Post by pphysch »

reaperducer wrote: post #173
meragrin_ wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!"

"Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!" I guess that Googler never uses Google. It's very hard to find anything on Google older than or more relevant than Taylor Swift's latest breakup.

"Taylor Swift before:2010"

With archive search, the News section floats links like https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/arts/music/09cara.html

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

#200

Post by henriquez »

Dalewyn wrote: post #195
SahAssar wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>our minified HTML Unreadable source code is a crime against humanity.

It’s also a crime against zorgons from Planet Zomblaki.
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