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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

#271

Post by olalonde »

graeme wrote: post #241
olalonde wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

100K+. Mostly AI and user generated content. I guess the sudden increase in number of indexed pages prompted a human review or triggered an algorithm which flagged my site as AI generated? Not sure.

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

#272

Post by andirk »

edmundsauto wrote: post #235
CharlesW wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> There comes a time when data analysis becomes astrology.

Excellent quote. It's counterintuitive but looking at what is most likely to happen according to the datasets presented can often miss the bigger picture.

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

#273

Post by MrVandemar »

jzb wrote: 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.

Librians regularly cull books. Magazines are cleared off the newstands weekly or monthly.

Storing and indexing and maintaining old content isn't free, in either dollars or environmental footprint.

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

#274

Post by digitcatphd »

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?

This is interesting, as I am actually doing the same thing with a site I have as I noticed my crawl budget has gotten less especially this year and fewer new articles are being indexed.

I suspect this is a long-term play for Google to phase out this search and replace with Bard. Think about it all these articles are doing now is writing a verbose version of what Bard gives you directly unless it’s new human content.

Google has in essence stolen all their information by scraping and storing in a database for its LLM and is offering its knowledge of this directly to users, so in a way, this is akin to Amazon selling its own private label products.

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

#275

Post by Dalewyn »

midoridensha wrote: post #268
Dalewyn wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So I guess you think compiled code is even worse, right?

I mean, isn't that precisely why open source advocates advocate for open source?

Not to mention, there is no need to "minify" HTML, CSS, or JavaShit for a browser to render a page unlike compiled code which is more or less a necessity for such things.

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

#278

Post by Roark66 »

So, let me get this right. CNET started using "generative AI" to write their articles. Google no doubt detected it and down ranked them to hell. CNET stopped the AI generation and they decided to delete their archives to improve their rankings?

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

#279

Post by Dalewyn »

hunter2_ wrote: post #223
naniwaduni wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 minif…

>If we wanted browsers to be fed code that for performance reasons isn't human-readable,

Worth keeping in mind that "performance" here refers to saving bandwidth costs as the host. Every single unnecessary whitespace or character is a byte that didn't need to be uploaded, hence minify and save on that bandwidth and thus $$$$.

The performance difference on the browser end between original and minified source code is negligible.

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

#280

Post by andirk »

jzb wrote: 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.

A really awesome on-the-ground website for information about specifics in collectibles was allexperts.com (now defunct). They got bought by something about.com who then got bought by a Thought Company? and they straight up deleted all of the 10+ years of people asking common questions about collectibles and getting solid answers. Poof.
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