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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

#231

Post by brendank310 »

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.

I think you're largely correct but Google isn't one person so there may be somewhat emergent patterns that work from an SEO standpoint that don't have a solid answer to Why. If I were an SEO customer I would ask for some proof but that isn't the market they're targeting. There was an old saying in the tennis instruction business that there was a bunch of 'bend your knees, fifty please'. So lots of snakeoil salesman but some salesman sell stuff that works.

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

#232

Post by bhawks »

kristopolous wrote: post #170
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 feel like they presume I'm a gullible person they need to protect who is just on the Internet for shopping and watching entertainment. Wasn't the point of them tracking us so much to customize and cater our results? Why have they normalized everything to some focus group persona of Joe six-pack? *** Let's try an experiment Type in "Chicago ticket" which has at least 4 interpretations, a ticket to travel to Chicago,…

Going deep into personalization on Google.com (answering queries using your signed in data across other google properties) feels like high risk low reward. In a post gdpr & right to be forgotten environment they know they have targets on their back. Is super deep personalization really worth getting slapped with megafines?

Where you'll see integrations like this used to be assistant, but is now bard. Both of which have lawyer boggling Eulas and a brand they can sacrifice if need be.

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

#233

Post by snowwrestler »

crazygringo wrote: post #7

Is there any evidence this would even work? Surely Google determines "fresh, relevant" content according to whatever has recently been published, which this doesn't change. If anything, doesn't Google consider sites with a long history of content with tons of inbound links as more authoritative and therefore higher-ranked? This baffles me. It baffles me why this would be successful SEO -- and assuming that it actuall…

In a major site redesign a couple years ago, we dropped 3/4 of our old URLs, and saw a big improvement in SEO metrics.

I know it doesn’t make sense and that Google says it is not necessary. But it clearly worked for us.

I think a fundamental truth about Google Search is that no one understands how it actually works anymore, including Google. They announce search algorithm updates with specific goals… and then silently roll out tweaks, more updates, etc. when the predicted effect doesn’t show up.

I think the idea that Google is in control and all the SEOs are just guessing, is wrong. I think it’s become a complex enough ML system that now all anyone can do is observe and adjust, including Google.

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

#234

Post by olalonde »

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!"

Maybe not related to the age of the content but more content can definitely penalize you. I recently added a sitemap to my site, which increased the amount of indexed pages, but it caused a massive drop in search traffic (from 500 clicks/day to 10 clicks/day). I tried deleting the sitemap, but it didn't help unfortunately.

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

#235

Post by edmundsauto »

CharlesW wrote: post #215
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.

> 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.

I’ve always felt there is a similarity to day traders or people who overanalyze stock fundamentals. There comes a time when data analysis becomes astrology…

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

#236

Post by ransom1538 »

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 stopped using search, I have switched 90% over to chatgpt.

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

#237

Post by snowwrestler »

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.

Google crawls the entire page, not just the subset of text that you, a human, recognize as the unchanged article.

It’s easy to change millions of pages once a week with on-load CMS features like content recommendations. Visit an old article and look at the related articles, most read, read this next, etc widgets around the page. They’ll be showing current content, which changes frequently even if the old article text itself does not.

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

#238

Post by snowwrestler »

tedunangst wrote: post #42
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…

How does Wikipedia manage to remain indexed?

Wikipedia’s strongest SEO weapon is how often wiki links get clicked on result pages, with no return.

They’re just truly useful pages, and that is reflected in how people interact with them.

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

#239

Post by iamflimflam1 »

whyenot wrote: post #150
kccqzy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It’s the same on YouTube - the majority of the people who work there seem to have no idea how “the algorithm” actually works - yet they still produce all sorts of “advice” on how to make better videos.

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

#240

Post by [deleted] »

dereg wrote: post #130
mxkopy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that the revenue increases have more to do with the addition of new users in developing markets rather than actual value added. Once all potential users have been reached, Google will have to actually improve their product.

No such suspicion is necessary. Google's revenue from the United States has only increased as a share of its total revenue over the past decade. https://abc.xyz/assets/4c/c7/d619b323f5bba689be986d716a61/34...

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