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

241–250 of 592 posts

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

#241

Post by graeme »

olalonde wrote: post #234
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!"

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.

How many pages are we talking about here?

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

#242

Post by vasco »

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.

Nobody tell this guy about compilers.

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

#244

Post by bagacrap »

technion wrote: post #178
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

There's an awful lot of SEO people on Twitter that claim to be connected to Google, and the article he links on the Google domain as a reference doesn't say anything on the topic that I can find. I'm reluctant to call that an official source.

He claims to work for Google on X, LinkedIn, and his own website. I am inclined to believe him because I think he would have received a cease and desist by now otherwise.

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

#245

Post by samplatt »

bagacrap wrote: post #123
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).

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.

Considering how much paid-for unimportant and unrelated drivel I now have to wade through every time I google to get what I am asking for, I doubt very much that whatever is optimal for search-engine ranking has anything to do with what users want.

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

#246

Post by vasco »

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…

When I enter a search query, that goes into Ads so that half the page can be relevant Ads instead of search results. That's a signal.

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

#247

Post by beefield »

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…

> Why do you assume malicious intent?

Not GP, but to me, admittably a complete non-expert on search, there are so many low-hanging fruits if search result quality was anywhere on Google's radar that it is really difficult not to assume malicious intent.

Some examples:

- why pinterest is flooding the image results with absolute nonesense? How difficult it would be to derank a single domain that manages to screw google's algorithm totally?

- why there is no option for me to blacklist domains from the search result? Are there really some challenges that can't be practically solved in a couple of minutes of thinking?

- Does google seriously claim they can't differentiate between stackoverflow and the content copying rip-off SEO spam sites?

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

#248

Post by wise_young_man »

codedokode wrote: post #103
strken wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the content is literally the same, the crawler should be able to use If-Modified-Since, right? It still has to make a HTTP request, but not parse or index anything.

If the content is dynamic (e.g. a list of popular articles in a sidebar has changed), then the page will be considered "updated".

This is not correct. It’s up to the server, controlled by the application to send that or other headers. Similar to sending a tag. The headers take priority and similar to what another person said they will do a HEAD request first and not bother with a GET request for the content.

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

#250

Post by gmerc »

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.

and does an LLM care … it feels like minification doesn’t stop one form explaining the code at all.
Post reply on HN