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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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would like to know what dollar amount Google makes on people typing things like “Amazon” into google search and then clicking the first paid result to Amazon.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I suppose the difference is that someone debugging at that level will be offered some sort of "dump" command or similar, whereas someone debugging in a browser is offered a "View Source" command. It's just a matter of convention and expectation.

If we wanted browsers to be fed code that for performance reasons isn't human-readable, web servers ought to serve something that's processed way more than just gzipped minification. It could be more like bytecode.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Turrles all the way down

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt those links are redirected to the CNET homepage.

Isn’t mass redirecting 404s to the homepage problematic SEO-wise?

Technically, you're supposed to do a 410 or a 404, but when some pages being deleted have those extremely valuable old high-reputation backlinks, it's just wasteful, so i'd say it's better to redirect, to the "next best page" like maybe a category or something, or the homepage, as the last resort. Why would it be problematic? Especially if you do a sweep and only redirect pages that have valuable backlinks.

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

#227

If you use a robots.txt file to put your site's archives off limits to Google, does Google obey that? Your own search box can still search them.

They would probably have thought of that if they had anyone left who knew anything about the internet...

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

#229
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.

The only History that exists today is that which doesn’t end with a 404.

We might as well burn the libraries, they serve no modern purpose.

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

#230
post #213

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? 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.

And MySpace generates about 10% of that now.

Google could be generating $27 billion in revenue in 2038 and be considered a massive failure compared to what it is now.

I fail to see the point you are trying to get at?

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