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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

#351
post #295
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

simple. Split google's Ad part, with search part and chrome part. Because it's clearly bullshit at this point.

How could search survive? The business value of search is in providing data for ads, is it not?

By running ads. Probably Google Ads. What it's already doing.

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

#353

I have noticed this at some of the sites I used to write for. Hence, as soon as I put a new piece up, I archive it at archive.is, and include that reference in my site's list of my work. Periodically, I should go there and check each one, but there's a lot of material. I did not know that this was a possible motivation as to why my more 'historic' work is disappearing, though.

Sites also just reorganize, change CMSs, simply go out of business (which can happen to archive.is as well). I save a lot of my own stuff but it's a bit hit or miss and I expect a lot of the material we lean on The Wayback Machine to save is probably pretty hard to actually discover.

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory I've heard is related to 'crawl budget'. Google is only going to devote a finite amount of time to indexing your site. If the number of articles on your site exceeds that time, some portion of your site won't be indexed. So by 'pruning' undesirable pages, you might boost attention on the articles you want indexed. No clue how this ends up working in practice. Google's suggestion isn't to delete pages, but…

How does Wikipedia manage to remain indexed?

Google search still prefers to give me at least 2-3 blogspam pages before the Wikipedia page with exactly the same keywords in the title as my query.

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

#355

This is why I work at archive.org. Is it perfect? No. Does it have value to society? Absolutely.

It's absolutely essential and irreplaceable for the web archive, and that's why I was pretty angry that you guys decided to pick a fight with the big publishers over "loaning" ebooks that could have gotten the whole site killed.

It was possibly a worthwhile fight for someone to have, but not for the site that hosts the Wayback Machine. Separation of concerns, my friends...

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

#356
post #272

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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.

This. It is often the scope and context that determines logic. It is easy to build bubbles and stay comfy inside. Without revealing much, I asked a data scientist whose job it is to figure out bids on keywords and essentially control how much $ is spent on advertising something at a specific region about negative criteria. As in, are you sure you wouldn’t get this benefit even if you stopped spending the $ and his response was “look at all this evidence that our spend caused this x% increase in traffic and y% more conversions” and that was 2 years ago. My follow up question was - okay, now that the thing you advertised is popular, wouldn’t it be the more organic choice in the market, and we can stop spending the $ there? His answer was - look at what happened when we stopped the advertising in this small region in Germany 1.5 years ago! My common sense validation question still stands. I still believe he built a shiny good bubble 2 years ago, and refuses to reason with wider context, and second degree effects.

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

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably not; anyone can claim to work for these companies with no repercussions, because is it a crime? Maybe if they're pricks that lower these companies' public opinion (libel), but even that requires a civil suit. But lying on the internet isn't a crime. I work for Google on quantum AI solutions in adtech btw.

with a gold badge, half a million followers, as well as a wikipedia page that mentions he works at google?

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

#358
post #351
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could search survive? The business value of search is in providing data for ads, is it not?

By running ads. Probably Google Ads. What it's already doing.

I thought that the ads on search were a nice to have, but that the real value of search was the profile it allows google to build about a person, which is then used by all ad systems used by google.

Split that off, and search is all of a sudden producing a whole let less value, since the profiling value cannot be meaningfully extracted by other companies.

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

#359
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The issues you pointed out might be due to a company policy of not manually manipulating search results and leaving it all to the algorithm. It can be argued that this leads them to improve their algorithm, although at this point I don't think any algorithm other than a good and big LLM/classifier-transformer can solve the ranking problem, and that is probably not economical or something. But OTOH they manually ban domains they deem to be not conformant to the views of the Party. (not CCP, 1984)

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

#360

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.

Even if it's not a ratio. When any metric becomes a target it will be gamed.

My organization tracks how many tickets we have had open for 30 days or more. So my team started to close tickets after 30 days and let them reopen automatically.

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