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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

#311

Post by sn41 »

basicoperation wrote: post #307
somedude895 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#312

Post by dawnerd »

water-your-self wrote: post #188
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.

Wrong, the best SEO is having what users want and withholding it long enough to get a high average session time.

See: every recipe site in existence.

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

#313

Post by DocTomoe »

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?

In all fairness, there is some old information I would love to disappear eventually. Nothing quite as frustrating than having a question and all the tutorials are for a version of a software that is 15 years old and behaves completely different than the new one.

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

#314

Post by hliyan »

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?

Before someone suggests a new search engine where the ranking algorithm is replaced with AI, I would like to propose a return to human-curated directories. Yahoo had one, and for a while, so did Google. It was pre-social-media and pre-wiki, so none of these directories were optimized to take advantage of crowdsourcing. Perhaps it's time to try again?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Directory

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

#315

Post by tempestn »

kawsper wrote: post #306
chronogram wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then you could also block those pages in robots.txt, no? (You do need to do both though, as otherwise pages can be indexed based on links, without being crawled.)

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

#316

Post by guy98238710 »

101008 wrote: post #119
guy98238710 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been recently forking off a subproject from Git repo. After spending a lot of time messing around with it and getting into a lot of unforeseen trouble, I finally asked ChatGPT how to do it and of course ChatGPT knew the correct answer all along. I felt like an idiot. Now I always ask ChatGPT first. These LLMs are way smarter than you would think. GPT4 with WolframAlpha plugin even gave me enough information to…

So you implemented a poly approx fror a Gaussian function without understanding what you were doing (implying that if you wanted to do it yourself it would take hours of studying). Good luck when you need to update it and adjust it - this is the equivalent than copying/pasting a function from Stack Overflow.

I double-checked everything, but that's beside the point. I was replying to GGP's insinuation that ChatGPT is unreliable. In my experience, it's more likely to return correct results than the first page of search. Search results often resemble random rambling about tangentially related topics whereas ChatGPT gets its answer right on first try. ChatGPT understands me when I have only a vague idea of what I want whereas search engines tend to fail even when given exact keywords. ChatGPT is also way more likely to do things right than me except in my narrow area of expertise.

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

#318

Post by black_puppydog »

hliyan wrote: post #314
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?

Before someone suggests a new search engine where the ranking algorithm is replaced with AI, I would like to propose a return to human-curated directories. Yahoo had one, and for a while, so did Google. It was pre-social-media and pre-wiki, so none of these directories were optimized to take advantage of crowdsourcing. Perhaps it's time to try again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Directory

I don't think we need any "AI" in the modern sense of that word. It would be an improvement to bring google back to its ~2010 status.

Not sure if the kagi folks are willing to share, but I get the impression that pagerank, tf-idf and a few heuristics on top would still get you pretty far. Add some moderation (known-bad sites that e.g. repost stackoverflow content) and you're already ahead of what google gives me.

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

#319

Post by hooby »

Something is going very wrong here.

Information on the internet should be in whatever format best suits the topic. The format that best serves the users looking for that information.

And search engines should learn to interpret that information and the various formats, in order to be able to best connect those searching information with those providing information. Yes, the search engine should adapt to the information and it's formats - not the other way round.

Instead we see "information" (or the AI-generated trite replacing it) adapt it's contents and format for search engines, in a bid to ultimately best serve advertisers. And search engines too adapt and change their algorithms to best serve advertisers.

As a result it becomes ever harder and harder for users to actually find the information they want in a format that works.

It's become so bad, that it's now more practicable to use advanced AI to filter out the actual information and re-format it, rather than go look for for it yourself.

As a human, you no longer want to use the web, and search... you want to have a bot that does that for you... because ultimately the space has become pretty hostile to humans.

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

#320

Post by ohgodplsno »

kccqzy wrote: post #108
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

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.

Google actively lies on an infinite number of subjects. And SEO is a completely adversarial subject where Google has an interest in lying to prevent some behaviors. While consultants and "growth hackers" are very often selling snake oil, that doesn't make Google an entity you can trust either.
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