In all seriousness, I thought cNet
CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
431–440 of 592 posts
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Exactly. This should be solvable without actually deleting the pages. I assume they're only removing articles with near-zero backlinks, so a noindex,nofollow should generally be fine, but if crawl budget is an issue robots.txt and sitemap can help.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#433So 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
RTFA does not include reading through every linked source.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#434Is there any evidence this would even work? Surely Google determines "fresh, relevant" content according to whatever has recently been published, which this doesn't change. If anything, doesn't Google consider sites with a long history of content with tons of inbound links as more authoritative and therefore higher-ranked? This baffles me. It baffles me why this would be successful SEO -- and assuming that it actuall…
In a major site redesign a couple years ago, we dropped 3/4 of our old URLs, and saw a big improvement in SEO metrics. I know it doesn’t make sense and that Google says it is not necessary. But it clearly worked for us. I think a fundamental truth about Google Search is that no one understands how it actually works anymore, including Google. They announce search algorithm updates with specific goals… and then silentl…
Which SEO metrics?
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#435Earlier 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…
Leos are generally given the “heroic/action-y” tropes, so if you are, for example, trying to pick Major League Baseball players, astrology could help a bit.
Right for the wrong reasons is still right.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. These are good in that they’re directly aligned with business outcomes but you still need sensible judgement in the loop. For example, say there’s an ice storm or heat wave which affects delivery times for a large region – y…
Selling something in one quarter, with the understanding that the customer returns it the next, is also clean cut accounting fraud.
Yeah, every part of this was a “don’t incentivize doing this”. I doubt anyone would ever be caught for that since there was nothing in writing but it was a complete farce of management. I heard those details over a beer with one of the people involved and he was basically wryly chuckling about how that vendor had good engineers and terrible management. They’re gone now so that caught up with them.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Somebody mentioned negligible/deleterious impacts on bandwidth for minified code in that thread, but they seemed to have low certainty. If you happen to have evidence otherwise, it might be informative for them.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#438So 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?
Did you notice that nowadays a lot of websites have a lot of uninteresting drivel giving a "background" to whatever the thing was you were searching for before you get to read (hopefully) the thing you were searching for? People discovered that Google measures not only how much time you stay on a webpage but also how much you scroll to define how interesting a website is. So now every crappy "tech tips" website that…
I've noticed something similar on youtube.
I search for "how to do X", and instead of just showing me how to do it, which might take 30 seconds, they put a ton of fluff and filler in to the video to make it last 5 minutes.
Typical video goes something like:
0 - Ads, if you're not using an ad blocker
1 - Intro graphics/animation
2 - "Hi, I'm ___, and in this video I'm going to show you how to do X"
3 - "Before I get in to that, I want to tell you about my channel and all the great things I do."
4 - "Like and subscribe."
5 - "Now let's get in to it..."
6 - "What is X?"
7 - "What's the history of X?"
8 - "Why X is so great."
9 - finally... "How to do X"
Fortunately you can skip around, but it's still a bunch of useless fluff and garbage content to get to the maybe 30 seconds of useful information.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit does this and it's very frustrating
Wow, I thought that was just me. The elation of googling for a niche Reddit topic and finding one very recent only to reach that sad realization that the content is 11y old and likely not relevant anymore.
Even worse when this happens, and you find that it's an old post you made. Happened to me more than once. I never realized this was intentional on reddit's part; I just assumed Google was broken.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#440Earlier 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
>JavaShit
Glad to see the diversity of HN readers apparently includes twelve year olds.
Anyway, you do realise plenty of languages have compilers with JS as a compilation target, right? How readable do you think that is?