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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

#341

Post by pawelmurias »

legutierr wrote: post #208
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!"

Do the engineers at Google even know how the Google algorithm actually works? Better than SEO experts who spend there time meticulously tracking the way that the algorithm behaves under different circumstances? My bet is that they don't. My bet is that there is so much old code, weird data edge cases and opaque machine-learning models driving the search results, Google's engineers have lost the ability to predict wha…

It's really hard to get a deep or solid understanding of something if you lack insider knowledge. The search algorithm is not something most Googlers have access too but I assume they observe what their algorithm does constantly in a lot of detail to measure what their changes are doing.

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

#342

Post by midasuni »

chaostheory wrote: post #155
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.

Is this why Google search is really terrible now? The search results are nearly unusable today compared to 1-2 years ago

People have said that for years.

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

#343

Post by llarsson »

The fact that they resorted to writing crap these days with AI is what is making them lose relevance, not that they have been in the business for a long time, and have thousands upon thousands of articles.

CNET used to, perhaps not be cool, but it certainly was a place you'd go get tech news from every once in a while. Just imagine they were huge enough to buy download.com, back then, even! For a while, they were essentially *the* place you'd go for downloads of various shareware stuff.

Now, it's a ghost town of a site with AI-written junk.

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

#344

Post by midoridensha »

Dalewyn wrote: post #336
midoridensha wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minifying code for browsers greatly reduces the amount of bandwidth needed to serve web traffic. There's a good reason it's done. By your logic, there's actually no reason to use compiled code at all, for almost anything above the kernel. We can just use Python to do everything, including run browsers, play video games, etc. Sure, it'll be dog-slow, but you seem to care more about reading the code than performance or…

I already alluded[1] to the incentives for the host to minify their JavaShit, et al., and you would have a point if it wasn't for the fact that performance otherwise isn't significantly different between minified and full source code as far as the user would be concerned. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37072473

I'm not talking about the browser's performance, I'm talking about the network bandwidth. All that extra JS code in every HTTP GET adds up. For a large site serving countless users, it adds up to a lot of bandwidth.

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

#345

Post by sznio »

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?

There doesn't have to be any malicious intent, just an endless chase for increased profit next quarter. SEO spam has more ads, thus generates more income for Google. Even if Ads and Search operate "completely independently", there must be a person in the corporate hierarchy which has control over both and could push the products to better synergize and make that KPI tick up.

Actually deranking sites which feature more than three Google Ads banners would improve search quality (mainly by making sites get to the point rather than padding a simple answer into an essay like an 8th grader at an exam) - but it would reduce Ads income so you cannot do it, no matter how independent you claim to be.

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

#346

Post by rightbyte »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #239
whyenot wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I got this feeling the YT algorithm is sticky and like "chooses" who to promote in some self reinforcing loop.

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

#347

Post by philsnow »

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...

or just plain numerology

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

#348

Post by jpk »

ajmurmann wrote: post #287
jpk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Also, the days of the "Advanced Search" page have passed, but Google still has time range options under the "Tools" button near the top of the results page. If they're giving the user the option to filter results by time, then it's pretty goofy for the algorithm to de-rank a site in results where the the default of "Any time" was selected in the query just because the site has old articles in the index.

I'm afraid that, as so often with any topic, the vast majority of users never or rarely uses the time filter and so everything gets optimized for the users to dumb to search properly.

In this case I'm not too keen on blaming users for this when the option is sorta buried in the current design. The Tools button isn't prominent, the current value of the time range option is completely hidden when it's on the default of "Any time", and the search query doesn't change if you alter the time range option. (And, to my knowledge, there's not a search query incantation for specifying the time range.)

If the current UI is a reflection of what PMs at Google want users to do, then they don't really care if the user uses, or even knows about, the option to filter by time. So I don't think it flies to point at the user and say, "you're holding it wrong".

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

#349

Post by hliyan »

dragonwriter wrote: post #321
hliyan wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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. False. Google Directory (and many other major name, mostly now defunct, web directories) were pow…

Interestingly, a static snapshot of DMOZ is still out there: https://dmoztools.net/ | https://web.archive.org/web/20180126194656/http://dmoztools....

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

#350

Post by ratg13 »

cout wrote: post #106
ghaff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article isn't super-clear about what's happening and, for most purposes, just dumping stuff on the Wayback Machine is probably not that different from deleting it even if the bits are still "somewhere." A few years back I copied any of my CNET stuff I cared about to my own site and, in general, that's a strategy I've followed with a number of sites as I don't expect anything to continue to be hosted or at least b…

I kinda wish there were some way to store every page I ever visit automatically and index it locally for easy search. Then when I want to look up e.g. the guy who had the popular liquid oxygen fire website back in the 90s it would be easy. But I also fear it would be used against me somehow too.

Someone posted this to HN a few days ago

https://linkwarden.app/

It looks very appealing, but I haven’t had a chance to try it myself just yet.

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