After I weeded my 20 year garden of personal content , I can confirm the blog was more relevant and a better user experience.
Not all content should be immortal.
CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
471–480 of 592 posts
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sho…
Your recommendations are not magically a description of how your algorithm actually behaves. And when they contradict, people are going to follow the algorithm, not the recommendation.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#473Can we all please start building decentralized tools now.
Stop giving these crap companies power over you and your data. You don't know what they'll do with your data in the future (think George Orwell).
As we can see these companies can out of the blue force other companies to delete their old articles. There goes freedom of speech just to rank higher on a shi*y search engine that no one smart even uses (I use brave search). Then again, these companies kowtowing to Googl mainly write for the brainwashed sheep. I personally don't use any of their privacy invasive analytics on my blog.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#474This seems like a win-win for CNET. They get publicity from the news and lots of typical outrage and Google-bashing comments. And if it doesn't improve the ranking as expected, they can always put back the old articles, quietly.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#475So 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…
Facebook doesn't have guidance telling content creators to publish conspiracy theories, but their policies are willfully optimized to promote it. Take responsibility for the results of your actions like an adult.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#476I've seen a couple news sources that are altering their publish dates to show near the top of news feeds. Google will announce "3 hours old", despite being weeks old.
I'm not certain they are altering publish dates, it is probably an error of Google. I've my own sites in the search results with wrong publishing dates, that don't make any sense.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#477Earlier 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.
You realize they have to combat an entire fleet of marketers and writers who are trying to leverage their algorithms?
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
It says it doesn't affect ranking and their quote tweet is even more explicit https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689297947740295168
Dude, like who is google? The judicial system of the web? No. Google has their own motivations here, they are a player not a rule maker. Don’t trust SEOs as no one actually knows what works, but certainly dont think google is telling you the absolute truth.
Ha, I actually totally agree with you, apparently my comment gave the wrong impression. I was just arguing with the GP's comment which was trying to (fruitlessly, as you point out) read tea leaves that aren't even there.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
But there's the rub, you're not making content more helpful. You're making it longer and more useless so we have to scroll down more so Google can rake in more ads. The fact that you're calling it more "helpful" is insidious. That's why garbage SEO sites are king on the internet right now. It's the same thing you guys do with Youtube, where you decreased monetization for videos under a certain length. Now every content creator is encouraged to artificially inflate the length of their video for more ads.
You're financially rewarding people for hiding information.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#480Imagine, 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…
There are search engines you can use right now, that offers superior quality to Google. It's not a sci-fi fantasy.