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

theverge.com

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

#441

Post by waynesonfire »

bee_rider wrote: post #430
burkaman wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they know how much you scroll? Does this mean you get penalized in search results if you don't use Google Analytics?

I mean, penalizing sites in their search platform for not using their advertising platform would be blatantly anticompetitive behavior, right? Surely Google is too afraid of our vigorous pro-competition regulatory agencies and would never do such a thing.

and the cherry on top is that they also own the browser. helps to thwart attempts to "scam" google analytics and track those poor a-holes that don't use it.

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

#442

Post by burkaman »

pmoriarty wrote: post #438
dep_b wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

That is explicitly encouraged by YouTube, if your video is at least 8 minutes (I think) you're allowed to add more ads.

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

#443

Post by ranie93 »

burkaman wrote: post #442
pmoriarty wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

That is explicitly encouraged by YouTube, if your video is at least 8 minutes (I think) you're allowed to add more ads.

I've noticed that any video that is 10:XX minutes long almost always is useless

They're probably reaching some YT threshold to have more ads show on it

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

#444

Post by throwaway290 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #376
throwaway290 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tree-shaking is orthogonal to minification tho.

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

#445

Post by Clent »

dep_b wrote: post #408
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?

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…

This has been going on for about a decade now. This alone has caused me to remove myself from Google's products and services. They have unilaterally made the internet worse.

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

#446

Post by ethbr0 »

ranie93 wrote: post #443
burkaman wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is explicitly encouraged by YouTube, if your video is at least 8 minutes (I think) you're allowed to add more ads.

I've noticed that any video that is 10:XX minutes long almost always is useless They're probably reaching some YT threshold to have more ads show on it

I can only tolerate modern YouTube at 1.5 or 2x playback speed. Principally because speaking slower to stretch video length has become endemic.

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

#447

Post by crazygringo »

snowwrestler wrote: post #237
crazygringo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as that linked guide explains, that's only relevant for sites with e.g. over a million pages changing once a week . That's for stuff like large e-commerce sites with constantly changing product info. Google is clear that if your content doesn't change often (in the way that news articles don't), then crawl budget is irrelevant.

Google crawls the entire page, not just the subset of text that you, a human, recognize as the unchanged article. It’s easy to change millions of pages once a week with on-load CMS features like content recommendations. Visit an old article and look at the related articles, most read, read this next, etc widgets around the page. They’ll be showing current content, which changes frequently even if the old article text…

I'm pretty sure Google is smart enough to recognize the main content of a page, and ignore things like widgets and navigation. That's Search Engine 101.

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

#448

Post by sowbug »

dep_b wrote: post #408
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?

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…

Also, "jump to recipe" could be a simple anchor tag that truly skips the drivel. But for some reason it executes ridiculous JavaScript that animates the scroll just slowly enough to trigger every ad's intersection observer along the way.

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

#449

Post by topherPedersen »

Luckily it's just one website making a dumb decision to delete their content. I doubt that this will actually boost their rankings, and I hope others don't follow CNET's lead. (Hopefully CNET is wrong, and that deleting your sites old content doesn't actually help your search engine ranking on Google.)

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

#450

Post by NelsonMinar »

mrd3v0 wrote: post #362
NelsonMinar wrote: post #160

Since everyone's reacting to the headline and hasn't read The Fine Article... Please let me call attention to the linked tweet from Google explicitly saying don't do this. > Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing! Our guidance doesn't encourage this. Older content can still be helpful, too. https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689…

And? I really do not get how a tweet from Google contradicts the fact that their search engine is hot garbage that incentivises spam, centralised silos and "SEO tricks" like what CNET is doing.

I don't have any agenda, it just seems like important context. c|net is doing something stupid and apparently it isn't even going to accomplish their goal. Maybe this statement from Google will help convince other companies not to do the same thing.

FWIW, I'm as mad about Google quality going downhill as anyone's. The problem of sites doing stupid things for SEO purposes goes back at least 20 years though.

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