Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 592 posts

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

#201

Post by julianeon »

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.

There’s an easy proof that those SEO consultants have a point: find a site that according to Google’s criteria will never rank, which has rocketed to the top of the search rankings in its niche within a couple months. That’s a regular thing and proves that there are ways to rank on Google that Google won’t advise.

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

#202

Post by Brian_K_White »

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

[flagged]

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

#203

Post by jzombie »

Could CNET not have relocated these articles to a distinct directory and then used robots.txt to prevent search engines from indexing them? This move seems like an excuse to offload subpar content by placing the blame on external factors. It's sort of like saying, "we withdrew a significant amount of cash from the bank and torched it to make space for fresh funds."

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

#204

Post by Denzel »

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…

> Google uses legitimate sites to make their search engine a viable product and at the same time directs traffic away from those legitimate sites towards SEO spam to generate revenue.

[Disclosure: Google Search SWE; opinions and thoughts are my own and do not represent those of my employer]

Why do you assume malicious intent?

The balance between search ranking (Google) and search optimization (third-party sites) is an adversarial, dynamic game played between two sides with inverse incentives, taking place on an economic field (i.e. limited resources). There is no perfect solution; there’s only an evolutionary act-react cycle.

Do you think content spammers spend more or less resources (people, time, money) than Google’s revenue? So then the problem becomes how do you win a battle with orders of magnitude less people, time, and money? Leverage, i.e., engineering. You try your best and watch the scoreboard.

Some people think Google is doing a great job; some think we couldn’t be any worse. The truth probably lies across a spectrum in the middle. So it goes with a globally consumed product.

Also, note, Ads and Search operate completely independent. There’s no signals going from Ads to Search, or vice versa, to inform rankings; Search can’t even touch a lot of the Ads data, and Ads can’t touch Search data. Which makes your theory misinformed.

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

#205

Post by hnick »

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.

Is minified "code" still "source code"? I think I'd say the source is the original implementation pre-minification. I hate it too when working out how something is done on a site, but I'm wondering where we fall on that technicality. Is the output of a pre-processor still considered source code even if it's not machine code? These are not important questions but now I'm wondering.

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

#206

Post by pseudalopex »

npunt wrote: post #175
pseudalopex wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was correct. And archive.org used this self inflicted problem to justify disregarding robots.txt. https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

Oh thank you for the update, that's great news! Agree with their position 100%.

> Agree with their position 100%.

Including the part where they blamed anyone but themselves for hiding old snapshots when robots.txt changed?

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

#207

Post by epakai »

CNET did this a while back, but it didn't seem SEO related then. They used to have tons of old tech specs. I remember them being the last source of specs for an obscure managed switch. Then the whole of that data just went away with no notice. Really great resource lost.

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

#208

Post by legutierr »

meragrin_ wrote: post #133
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).

> 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!"

Do the engineers at Google even know how the Google algorithm actually works? Better than SEO experts who spend there time meticulously tracking the way that the algorithm behaves under different circumstances?

My bet is that they don't. My bet is that there is so much old code, weird data edge cases and opaque machine-learning models driving the search results, Google's engineers have lost the ability to predict what the search results would be or should be in the majority of cases.

SEO experts might not have insider knowledge, but they observe in detail how the algorithm behaves, in a wide variety of circumstances, over extended periods of time. And if they say that deleting old content improves search ranking, I'm inclined to believe them over Google.

Maybe the people at Google can tell us what they want their system to do. But does it do what they want it to do anymore? My sense is that they've lost control.

I invite someone from Google to put me in my place and tell me how wrong I am about this.

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

#209

Post by romusha »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #183
reaperducer wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I think in this context, saying that it's not a thing that google doesn't like old content just means that google doesn't penalize sites as a whole for including older pages, so deleting older pages won't help boost the site's ranking. This is not the same as saying that it doesn't prioritize newer pages over older pages in the search results. The way it's worded does sound like it could imply the latter thing, but t…

"poor writing" is the new "merely joking guys!"

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

#210

Post by Dalewyn »

hnick wrote: post #205
Dalewyn wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is minified "code" still "source code"? I think I'd say the source is the original implementation pre-minification. I hate it too when working out how something is done on a site, but I'm wondering where we fall on that technicality. Is the output of a pre-processor still considered source code even if it's not machine code? These are not important questions but now I'm wondering.

The minified HTML (and, god forbid, JavaShit) is the source from which the browser ultimately renders a page, so yes that is source code.
Post reply on HN