CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by dannysullivan » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:48 PM UTC

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).

Hi. So I'm the person at Google quoted in the article and also who shared about this myth here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800

It's not that we discourage it. It's not something we recommend at all. Not our guidance. Not something we've had a help page about saying "do this" or "don't do this" because it's just not something we've felt (until now) that people would somehow think they should do -- any more than "I'm going to delete all URLs with the letter Y in them because I think Google doesn't like the letter Y."

People are free to believe what they want, of course. But we really don't care if you have "old" pages on your site, and deleting content because you think it's "old" isn't likely to do anything for you.

Likely, this myth is fueled by people who update content on their site to make it more useful. For example, maybe you have a page about how to solve some common computer problem and a better solution comes along. Updating a page might make it more helpful and, in turn, it might perform better.

That's not the same as "delete because old" and "if you have a lot of old content on the site, the entire site is somehow seen as old and won't rank better."

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

#462

Post by dannysullivan » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #220

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the actual quote from Google PR: >Removing it might mean if you have a massive site that we’re better able to crawl other content on the site. But it doesn’t mean we go “oh, now the whole site is so much better” because of what happens with an individual page. Parsing this carefully, to me it sounds worded to give the impression removing old pages won’t help the ranking of other pages without explicitly sayin…

The tweet is also clearly saying that deleting old content will increase the average page rank of your articles in the first N hours after it is published. (Because the time to first crawl will decrease, and the page rank is effectively zero before the first crawl). CNet is big enough that I’d expect Google to ensure the crawler has fresh news articles from it, but that isn’t explicitly said anywhere.

I did the tweet. It is clearly not saying anything about the "average page rank" of your articles because those words don't appear in the tweet at all. And PageRank isn't the only factor we use in ranking pages. And it's not related to "gosh, we could crawl your page in X hours therefore you get more PageRank."

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

#463

Post by Capricorn2481 » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:52 PM UTC

dannysullivan wrote: post #460

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?

Hello from Google! I work for our search ranking team. Sadly, we can't control publishers who do things that we do not advise and do not recommend. We have no guidance telling publishers to get rid of "old" content. That's not something we've said. I shared this week that it is not something we recommend: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 This also documents the many times over the years we…

It doesn't matter if your guidance discourages it, your SEO algorithm is encouraging it. What you call "helpful" in your post is what is financially helpful to Google, not what's helpful to me.

There's no denying Google encourages long rambling nonsense over direct information

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

#464

Post by dannysullivan » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:54 PM UTC

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…

The engineers at Google do know how our algorithmic systems work because they write them. And the engineers I work with at Google looking at the article about this found it strange anyone believes this. It's not our advice. We don't somehow add up all the "old" pages on a site to decide a site is too "old" to rank. There's plenty of "old" content that ranks; plenty of sites that have "old" content that rank. If you or anyone wants our advice on what we do look for, this is a good starting page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat...

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

#465

Post by dannysullivan » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #214

legutierr wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, Once upon a time, Matt Cutts would come on HN give a fairly knowledgeable and authoritative explanation of how Google worked. But those days are gone and I'd say so are days of standing behind any articulated principle.

I work for Google and do come into HN occasionally. See my profile and my comments here. I'd come more often if it were easier to know when there's something Google Search-related happening. There's no good "monitor HN for X terms" thing I've found. But I do try to check, and sometimes people ping me.

In addition, if you want an explanation of how Google works, we have an entire web site for that: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/

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

#466

Post by TheKarateKid » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

dannysullivan wrote: post #460

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?

Hello from Google! I work for our search ranking team. Sadly, we can't control publishers who do things that we do not advise and do not recommend. We have no guidance telling publishers to get rid of "old" content. That's not something we've said. I shared this week that it is not something we recommend: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 This also documents the many times over the years we…

Are the employees at Google working on Search aware of how bad search results have become in the past year or two? Literally almost everyone I know, inside and outside of tech, has noticed a significant downgrade in quality from Google search results. And a lot of it is due to artificially inflated SEO techniques.

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

#467

Post by dannysullivan » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

TheKarateKid wrote: post #466

dannysullivan wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello from Google! I work for our search ranking team. Sadly, we can't control publishers who do things that we do not advise and do not recommend. We have no guidance telling publishers to get rid of "old" content. That's not something we've said. I shared this week that it is not something we recommend: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 This also documents the many times over the years we…

Are the employees at Google working on Search aware of how bad search results have become in the past year or two? Literally almost everyone I know, inside and outside of tech, has noticed a significant downgrade in quality from Google search results. And a lot of it is due to artificially inflated SEO techniques.

We've been diligently working to improve the results through things like our helpful content system, and that work is continuing. You can read about some of it in a recent post here (and it also describes the Perspectives feature that's live on mobile): https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-perspectiv...

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

#468

Post by dannysullivan » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #463

dannysullivan wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello from Google! I work for our search ranking team. Sadly, we can't control publishers who do things that we do not advise and do not recommend. We have no guidance telling publishers to get rid of "old" content. That's not something we've said. I shared this week that it is not something we recommend: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 This also documents the many times over the years we…

It doesn't matter if your guidance discourages it, your SEO algorithm is encouraging it. What you call "helpful" in your post is what is financially helpful to Google, not what's helpful to me. There's no denying Google encourages long rambling nonsense over direct information

No one has demonstrated getting rid of "old" content somehow makes the rest of the site "fresh" and therefore ranks better. What's likely the case is that some people have updated content to make it more useful -- more up-to-date -- and the content being more helpful might, in turn, perform better. That's a much different thing that "if you have a lot of old content, the entire site is somehow old." And if you read the CNET memo, you'll see there's a confusion with these points.

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

#469

Post by Jiro » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #98

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?

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

"Google says you shouldn't do it" and "Google's search algorithm says that you should do it" can both be true at the same time. The official guidance telling you what to do doesn't track with what the search algorithm uses to decide search placement. Nobody's going to follow Google's written instructions if following the instructions results in a penalty and disobeying them results in a benefit.

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

#470

Post by sgc » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 4:04 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #446

ranie93 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some of those people seem to be speaking so slow that it is excruciating to listen to them. When I find someone who speaks at a normal speed and I have to slow the video down, they usually have more interesting things to say.

That said, tinkering before and after youtube has been two different worlds. I really like having video to learn hands-on activities. I just wrapped up some mods to a Rancilio Silvia, and I noticed my workflow was videos, how-to guides and blog posts, broader electrical information documentation, part specific manuals / schematics, and my own past knowledge. I felt very efficient having been through the process before, and knowing when to lean on which resource. But the videos are by far the best resource to orient myself when first jumping in to the project, and thus save me a lot of time.