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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

#501

Post by jrockway »

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…

I mean, people are bad at editing. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I've written a long letter instead." I don't think it's a conspiracy.

I definitely write super long things when I consciously make the decision to not spend much time on something. Meanwhile, I've been working on a blog post for the better part of 2 years because it's too long, but doesn't cover everything I want to discuss. If you want people to retain the content, you have to pare it down to the essentials! This is hard work.

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

#502

Post by dannysullivan »

micadep wrote: post #495
dannysullivan wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What the Google algorithm encourage/discourage and what google blog or documentation encourage/discourage are COMPLETELY different things. Most people here are complaining about the former, and you keep responding about the latter.

No one has demonstrated that simply removing content that's "old" means we think a site is "fresh" and therefore should do better. There are people who perhaps updated older content reasonably to keep it up-to-date and find that making it more helpful that way can, in turn, do better in search. That's reasonable. And perhaps that's gotten confused with "remove old, rank better" which is a different thing. Hopefully, people may better understand the difference from some of this discussion.

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

#503

Post by jrockway »

chankstein38 wrote: post #458
ethbr0 wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same. I think it's a mix of that and this "presenter voice" everyone thinks they have to use. My ADHD brain doesn't focus on it well because it's too slow so it's useless to me but all my life I've been told when presenting I should speak slowly and articulately while the reality is that watching anyone speak that way drives me nuts

What's great about writing is that readers can go at their own pace. When speaking, you have to optimize for your audience and you probably lose more people by being too fast vs. the people you lose by talking too slow. I have to say I appreciate YouTubers that go a million miles an hour (hi EEVBlog). As a native speaker of English, I can keep up. But you have to realize, most people in the world are not native speakers of English.

(The converse is; whenever I turn on a Hololive stream I'd say that I pick up 20% of what they're saying. If they talked slower, I would probably watch more than every 3 months. But, they rightfully don't feel the need to optimize for non-native speakers of Japanese.)

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

#504

Post by hashtag-til »

dannysullivan wrote: post #497
lampshades wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said L3 so I was curious. I looked up the guy's LinkedIn [0] and honestly an L3 engineer would have a lot more context about Google's search. Danny, what do you even do? [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannysullivan/

I work for our search quality team, directly reporting to the head of that team, to help explain how search works to people outside Google and bring concerns and feedback back into team so we can look at ways to improve. I came to the position about six years ago after retiring from writing about search engines as a journalist, explaining how they work to people from 1996 onward.

That’s impressive! Congrats.

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

#505

Post by mrguyorama »

dannysullivan wrote: post #497
lampshades wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said L3 so I was curious. I looked up the guy's LinkedIn [0] and honestly an L3 engineer would have a lot more context about Google's search. Danny, what do you even do? [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannysullivan/

I work for our search quality team, directly reporting to the head of that team, to help explain how search works to people outside Google and bring concerns and feedback back into team so we can look at ways to improve. I came to the position about six years ago after retiring from writing about search engines as a journalist, explaining how they work to people from 1996 onward.

So you're PR

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

#506

Post by pohl »

dannysullivan wrote: post #496
pohl wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great that you responded to the question. Is there a reason you didn't answer it, though?

"We've been diligently working to improve the results" was the response to the question of "Are the employees at Google working on Search aware of how bad search results have become in the past year or two?" I thought that was a clear response. To be more explicit, yes, we're aware that there are complaints about the quality of search results. That's why we've been working in a variety of ways, as I indicated, to imp…

It was clearly a response, yes, but an answer is always better than a response. Thank you for answering!

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

#507

Post by gretch »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #282
MrVandemar wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Librians regularly cull books. Magazines are cleared off the newstands weekly or monthly. Storing and indexing and maintaining old content isn't free, in either dollars or environmental footprint.

>Storing and indexing and maintaining old content isn't free, in either dollars or environmental footprint. It's pretty close to free.

Why don't you go ahead and personally do it then? It's pretty close to free.

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

#508

Post by SahAssar »

Dalewyn wrote: post #195
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.

>our minified HTML Unreadable source code is a crime against humanity.

Minifying HTML is basically just removing non-significant whitespace. Run it through a formatter and it will be readable.

If you dislike unreadable source code I would assume you would object to minifying JS, in which case you should ask people to include sourcemaps instead of objecting to minification.

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

#509

Post by lampshades »

mrguyorama wrote: post #505
dannysullivan wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for our search quality team, directly reporting to the head of that team, to help explain how search works to people outside Google and bring concerns and feedback back into team so we can look at ways to improve. I came to the position about six years ago after retiring from writing about search engines as a journalist, explaining how they work to people from 1996 onward.

So you're PR

Yes, I believe you are correct.

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

#510

Post by mrguyorama »

filcuk wrote: post #425
Dalewyn wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, isn't that precisely why open source advocates advocate for open source? Not to mention, there is no need to "minify" HTML, CSS, or JavaShit for a browser to render a page unlike compiled code which is more or less a necessity for such things.

Well, no, but it can speed up loading by reducing transfer.

Is that still true with modern compression?
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