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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

#211

Post by chongli »

Denzel wrote: post #204
chongli wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Also, note, Ads and Search operate completely independent

That’s the mistake. They should be talking. Sites that engage in unethical SEO to game search rankings should be banned from Google’s ad platform. Why aren’t they? Because Google is profiting from the arrangement.

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

#212

Post by kuchenbecker »

azlev wrote: post #61
flangola7 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What reasons would there to be to delete old new articles? My inner historian is screaming.

Deleting old articles ease the burden to manage it. There are infrastructure costs and manage costs.

The benefit they get from those articles is probably near zero but the maintenance cost is tangible.

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

#213

Post by gretch »

reaperducer wrote: post #174
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?

What a fantasy. It does not show any sign of profit decrease. How would a company die with $279.8B revenue, steadily increasing yearly? At one time both buggy whips and Philco radios had hockey stick growth charts, too. You must not bet old enough to remember when people thought MySpace would always drive the internet.

> You must not bet old enough to remember when people thought MySpace would always drive the internet.

You know there's a difference between "people thought" and dollars.

Some people think the earth is flat. Opinions can change very quickly - like 5 years ago, people thought elon musk was the hero of the internet.

Here's the stats on MySpace revenue: It generated $800 million in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year.

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

#214

Post by joe_the_user »

legutierr wrote: post #208
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!"

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 wha…

Yeah,

Once upon a time, Matt Cutts would come on HN give a fairly knowledgeable and authoritative explanation of how Google worked. But those days are gone and I'd say so are days of standing behind any articulated principle.

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

#215

Post by CharlesW »

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.

> In my experience SEO experts are the most superstitious tech people I ever met.

And some are the most data-driven people you'll ever meet. As with most people who claim to be experts, the trick is to determine whether the person you're evaluating is a legitimate professional or a cargo-culting wanna-be.

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

#216

Post by naniwaduni »

Dalewyn wrote: post #210
hnick wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The ISA bytecode is the source from which the processor ultimately executes a program, so yes that is source code."

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

#217

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#218

Post by gcanyon »

My first reaction was to think "Google is a shitty search engine if CNET can improve their search ranking by deleting information."

But then I thought about scenarios where this might be legitimate. If we assume:

    1. Google has some ability to assess the value of content that isn't 100% reliable at a per-article level, but in aggregate is accurate.
    2. Google therefore has the ability to judge CNET's content quality score in aggregate, and use that in search rankings for individual articles.
    3. CNET knows that they have articles that rate well on Google's quality score, and articles that rate poorly.
    4. CNET has reason to think they can generally distinguish "good" articles from "bad" articles.
THEN it would (could?) make sense to remove the "bad" articles in order to raise their aggregate quality score. It's kind of like the Laffer Curve of Google Content Quality. Overall traffic could go up if the "bad" articles are "bad" enough.

That said, unless CNET was publishing absolutely useless garbage at some point, it would make a lot more sense to just de-index those articles, or even for Google to provide a way for a site to mark lower-quality articles, so Google understands that the overall quality score shouldn't be harmed by that article about the Top 5 Animals As Ranked By Hitler, but if someone actually Googles that, it's fine for CNET to have retained that article, and for Google to send them to it.

In short: Google advising sites not to do this when there are perfectly reasonable alternatives seems silly.

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

#219

Post by loandbehold »

xdennis wrote: post #124
loandbehold wrote: post #9

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 tried using ChatGPT as a search engine, but it's too slow. With DuckDuckGo/Google you can just go to the domain, type, enter and you have your answer. I haven't used it in a few months, but with ChatGPT you have to log in, pass various screenings, hope it's now down, and then finally get to where you can type. With a regular search engine you've already found your answer by that time.

I have ChatGPT4 tab open most of the time, so it's always ready to go.

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

#220

Post by hedora »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #193
magicalist wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sayin…

The tweet is also clearly saying that deleting old content will increase the average page rank of your articles in the first N hours after it is published. (Because the time to first crawl will decrease, and the page rank is effectively zero before the first crawl).

CNet is big enough that I’d expect Google to ensure the crawler has fresh news articles from it, but that isn’t explicitly said anywhere.

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