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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

#301

Post by [deleted] »

bagacrap wrote: post #98
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'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

[deleted]

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

#302

Post by throwaway290 »

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.

Source code is what you write and read, but sometimes you write one thing and people can only read it after your pre processing. Why not enable pretty output?

Plus I suspect minifying HTML or JS is often cargo cult (for small sites who are frying the wrong fish) or compensating for page bloat

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

#303

Post by idonotknowwhy »

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.

The crtgaming community hate that a few years ago, they deleted all the specs for old CRT monitors :(

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

#304

Post by flangola7 »

ghaff wrote: post #45
flangola7 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Companies are not, in general, in the business of being the archive of record. They're, among other things, in the business of providing their current customers with the information that's most applicable and correct for their current needs and not something relevant to a completely different version of software from 10 years ago.

Ok Captain Obvious. That isn't useful OR new information.

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

#305

Post by josefx »

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.

My data driven climate model indicates that we could combat climate change by hiring more pirates.

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

#306

Post by kawsper »

chronogram wrote: post #269
samtp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move the articles to archived.cnet.com or cnetarchive.com instead of just deleting them

They can just set a noindex tag in the HTML head or send it in the http response header for older pages, then links still work.

It's my understanding that doing what you propose will still use up the crawl budget, because the bot will have to download the page and parse it to understand that it is no-indexed.

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

#307

Post by basicoperation »

somedude895 wrote: post #265
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

I could imagine CNET‘s SEO team got an average rank goal instead of absolute SEO traffic. So by removing low ranked old pages the avg position of their search results goes closer to the top even though total traffic sinks. I‘ve seen stuff like this happen at my own company as well, where a team‘s KPIs are designed such that they‘ll ruin absolute numbers in order to achieve their relative KPI goals, like getting an in…

In general, people often forget that if your target is a ratio, you can attack the numerator or the denominator. Often the latter is the easier to manipulate.

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

#308

Post by Flameancer »

petee wrote: post #5

I've seen a couple news sources that are altering their publish dates to show near the top of news feeds. Google will announce "3 hours old", despite being weeks old.

Yea I’ve noticed that as well. It’s really annoying when you search for something new but it links to an article that says a few months but it’s in fact years old.

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

#309

Post by johnnyworker »

Mistletoe wrote: post #262
kristopolous wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I get four top results for paying a parking ticket in Chicago, a city I’ve never been to.

Same here. Never been to Chicago, live in Germany.

https://imgur.com/a/BXRnqIB

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

#310

Post by politelemon »

farnarkle wrote: post #111
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

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).

I think you have misread the tweet. It says it does not work _and_ discourages the action.
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