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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

#371

Post by Hard_Space »

ghaff wrote: post #353
Hard_Space wrote: post #331

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.

True about archive.is being probably more at risk than WayBack Machine. I just don't know when I'll ever get the 2-3 days necessary to additionally back the posts up at WM, because each save is very slow.

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

#372

Post by hnick »

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…

Let's be honest, a lot of non-minified JS code is barely legible either :)

For me I guess what I was getting at is that I consider source the stuff I'm working on - the minified output I won't touch, it's output. But it is input for someone else, and available as a View Source so that does muddy the waters, just like decompilers produce "source" that no sane human would want to work on.

I think semantically I would consider the original source code the "real" source if that makes sense. The source is wherever it all comes from. The rest is various types of output from further down the toolchain tree. I don't know if the official definition agrees with that though.

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

#373

Post by nologic01 »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #364
nologic01 wrote: post #337

Imagine, if you will, an utopic world where a critical service such as finding anything is not dominated by one (1) entity but an actual number - such as ten (10). Sci-fi novels describe this hypothetical market structure as a "competitive market". In this utopic arrangement, users of search services are more-or-less evenly distributed among different search providers, enjoying a variety of different takes on how to…

Search is an inherently centralizing and monopolizing industry. The one with the biggest index can show the best results and ads, thus has the biggest budget, and the one with the biggest budget has the biggest index.

There are more assumptions than words in this sentence.

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

#374

Post by hef19898 »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #270
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…

This is why KPIs or targets should NEVER be calculated values like averages or ratios. The team is then incentivized to do something hostile such as not promote the content as much so that the ratio is higher, as soon as they barely scrape past the impressions mark.

Sure they can, e.g. on-time delivery (or even better shipments missing the promised delivery date) is a ratio. Or inventory turn rates, there you actually want people to attack the denominator.

Generaly speaking, an easy solution is to attach another target to either the nominator or denominator, a target that requires people to move that in value in acertqin direction. That might even be a different team thanthe one having goals on the ratio.

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

#375

Post by robertlagrant »

reacharavindh wrote: post #356
andirk wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 re…

The people who spend on marketing are not incentivised to spend less :)

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

#376

Post by robertlagrant »

throwaway290 wrote: post #302
hnick wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It does stuff like tree shaking as well; it's quite good. If your page is bloated, it makes it better. If your page is not bloated, it makes it better.

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

#377

Post by knallfrosch »

nologic01 wrote: post #373
Aerbil313 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is an inherently centralizing and monopolizing industry. The one with the biggest index can show the best results and ads, thus has the biggest budget, and the one with the biggest budget has the biggest index.

There are more assumptions than words in this sentence.

Yet reality seems eerily similar

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

#378

Post by [deleted] »

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).

[deleted]

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

#379

Post by pembrook »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #335
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.

One SEO expert who consulted for a bank I worked at wanted us to change our URLs from e.g. /products/savings-accounts/apply by reversing them to /apply/savings-accounts/products on the grounds that the most specific thing about the page must be as close to the domain name as possible, according to them. I actually went ahead and changed our CMS to implement this (because I was told to). I'm sure the SEO expert got pa…

Unfortunately though, this was likely good advice.

The yandex source code leak revealed that keyword proximity to root domain is a ranking factor. Of course, there’s nearly a thousand factors and “randomize result” is also a factor, but still.

SEO is unfortunately a zero sum game so it makes otherwise silly activities become positive ROI.

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

#380

Post by BonoboIO »

scrame wrote: post #148

cnet got bought by vulture capital a couple years back and already had been replacing writers with crap AI before chatGPT was a thing. this shouldn't be a surprise. everything CNET related has been a walking corpse for a while now.

I remember that CNET was a credible source 10 years ago, now it’s like a tabloid that reports 1 week old stories with clickbait titles and thin content.
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