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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

#511

Post by SahAssar »

CharlesW wrote: post #215
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.

> 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.

The data analysis I've seen most SEO experts do is similar to sitting at a highway, carefully timing the speed of each car, taking detailed notes of the cars appearance, returning to the car factory and saying that all cars need to be red because the data says red cars are faster.

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

#512

Post by mthoms »

lampshades wrote: post #490
smoldesu wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take responsibility for the results of your actions like an adult. "your actions", give me a break. The parent commenter doesn't own Google, and you aren't forced to use the platform. Are people on this site really convinced that an L3 Google engineer can flick the "Fix Google" switch on the search engine?

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/

Before Google, Danny Sullivan was a well respected search engine blogger/journalist. As far as I know, he isn't an engineer. There's no need to be rude.

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

#513

Post by mrguyorama »

dannysullivan wrote: post #464
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…

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 o…

>The engineers at Google do know how our algorithmic systems work because they write them.

So there's zero machine learning or statistical modeling based functionality in your search algorithms?

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

#514

Post by dannysullivan »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #193
magicalist wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says it doesn't affect ranking and their quote tweet is even more explicit https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689297947740295168

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…

It's not from Google PR. It's from me. I'm the public liaison for Google Search. I work for our search quality team, not for our PR team.

It's not worded in any way intended to be parsed. I mean, I guess people can do that if they want. But there's no hidden meaning I put in there.

Indexing and ranking are two different things.

Indexing is about gathering content. The internet is big, so we don't index all the pages on it. We try, but there's a lot. If you have a huge site, similarly, we might not get all your pages. Potentially, if you remove some, we might get more to index. Or maybe not, because we also try to index pages as they seem to need to be indexed. If you have an old page that doesn't seem to change much, we probably aren't running back ever hour to it in order to index it again.

Ranking is separate from indexing. It's how well a page performs after being indexed, based on a variety of different signals we look at.

People who believe removing "old" content aren't generally thinking that's going to make the "new" pages get indexed faster. They might think that maybe it means more of their pages overall from a site could get indexed, but that can include "old" pages they're successful with, too.

The key thing is if you go to the CNET memo mentioned in Gizmodo article, it says this:

"it sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results."

Maybe CNET thinks getting rid of older content does this, but it's not. It's not a thing. We're not looking at a site, counting up all the older pages and then somehow declaring the site overall as "old" and therefore all content within it can't rank as well as if we thought it was somehow a "fresh" site.

That's also the context of my response. You can see from the memo that it's not about "and maybe we can get more pages indexed." It's about ranking.

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

#515

Post by dgb23 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #302
hnick wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is minified "code" still "source code"? I think I'd say the source is the original implementation pre-minification. I hate it too when working out how something is done on a site, but I'm wondering where we fall on that technicality. Is the output of a pre-processor still considered source code even if it's not machine code? These are not important questions but now I'm wondering.

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 doesn't compensate bloat, but it reduces bytes sent over the wire, bytes cached in between and bytes parsed in your browser for _very_ little cost.

You can always open dev tools in your browser and have an interactive, nicely formatted HTML tree there with a ton of inspection and manipulation features.

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

#516

Post by 0x0203 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #459
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…

Sponsorblock is great for cleaning this crap up. Besides skipping sponsor segments, I have it set to autoskip unpaid/self promotion, interaction reminders, intermissions/intros, endcards/credits, and filler tangent/jokes set to manual skip.

One thing I really wish sponsorblock would add is the ability to mask off some part of the screen with an option to mute. More and more channels are embedding on-screen ads, animations, and interaction "reminders" that are, at best, distracting.

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

#517

Post by b3orn »

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…

You forgot the sponsor stuff that's 20% of the video's length.

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

#518

Post by edmundsauto »

bee_rider wrote: post #435
edmundsauto wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right for the wrong reasons doesn't give confidence it's a sustainable skill. Getting right via randomness also fits into the same category.

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

#519

Post by dannysullivan »

reaperducer wrote: post #173
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!"

"Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!" I guess that Googler never uses Google. It's very hard to find anything on Google older than or more relevant than Taylor Swift's latest breakup.

That Googler here. I do use Google! And yeah, I get sometimes people want older content and we show fresher content. We have systems designed to show fresher content when it seems warranted. You can imagine a lot of people searching about Maui today (sadly) aren't wanting old pages but fresh content about the destruction there.

Our ranking system with freshness is explained more here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking...

But we do show older content, as well. I find often when people are frustrated they get newer content, it's because of that crossover where there's something fresh happening related to the query.

If you haven't tried, consider our before: and after: commands. I hope we'll finally get these out of beta status soon, but they work now. You can do something like before:2023 and we wouldn't show pages from before 2023 (to the best we can determine dates). They're explained more here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272

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

#520

Post by mrguyorama »

bagacrap wrote: post #244
technion wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an awful lot of SEO people on Twitter that claim to be connected to Google, and the article he links on the Google domain as a reference doesn't say anything on the topic that I can find. I'm reluctant to call that an official source.

He claims to work for Google on X, LinkedIn, and his own website. I am inclined to believe him because I think he would have received a cease and desist by now otherwise.

He claims to work for google as search "liason". He's a PR guy. His job is to make people think that google's search system is designed to improve the internet, instead of it being designed to improve google's accounting.
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