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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

#521

Post by dannysullivan »

technion wrote: post #178
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

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.

I'm the source. I officially work for Google. The account is verified by X. It's followed by the official Google account. It links to my personal account; my personal account links back to it. I'm quoted in the Gizmodo story that links to the tweet. I'm real! Though now perhaps I doubt my own existence....

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

#522

Post by dannysullivan »

shortformblog wrote: post #393
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.

Journalist here. Danny Sullivan works for Google, but spent nearly 20 years working outside of Google as a fellow journalist in the SEO space before he was hired by the company. He was the guy who replaced Matt Cutts.

thanks, Ernie!

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

#523

Post by mthoms »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #498
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?

> Are people on this site really convinced that an L3 Google engineer can flick the "Fix Google" switch on the search engine? No, it's just when someone speaks on behalf of the company with the terms "we," they are typically addressed with "you." That doesn't mean we think they're the CEO. Are you unfamiliar with this concept? I can send you an SEO guide on it.

You're missing the point; This guy has zero power over what Google does so publicly berating him is not going to accomplish anything.

And anyways, the sentence "Take responsibility for the results of your actions like an adult" actually does imply he has some personal responsibility here. It's not helpful to the discussion and it's rude.

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

#524

Post by dannysullivan »

seriocomic wrote: post #404
shortformblog wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalist here. Danny Sullivan works for Google, but spent nearly 20 years working outside of Google as a fellow journalist in the SEO space before he was hired by the company. He was the guy who replaced Matt Cutts.

1st paragraph is correct , 2nd not quite - Matt Cutts was a distinguished engineer (looking after web spam at Google) who took on the role of the search spokesperson - it’s that role Danny took over as “search liaison”

No. But it's also complicated, as Matt did thinks beyond web spam. Matt worked within the search quality team, and he communicated a lot from search quality to the outside world about how Search works. After Matt left, someone else took over web spam. Meanwhile, I'd retired from journalism writing about search. Google approached me about starting what became a new role of "public liaison of search," which I've done for about six years now. I work within the search quality team, just as Matt did, and that type of two-way communication role he had, I do. In addition, we have an amazing Search Relations team that also works within search quality, and they focus specifically on providing guidance to site owners and creators (my remit is a bit broader than that, so I deal with more than just creator issues).

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

#525

Post by mrguyorama »

kristopolous wrote: post #170
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 feel like they presume I'm a gullible person they need to protect who is just on the Internet for shopping and watching entertainment. Wasn't the point of them tracking us so much to customize and cater our results? Why have they normalized everything to some focus group persona of Joe six-pack? *** Let's try an experiment Type in "Chicago ticket" which has at least 4 interpretations, a ticket to travel to Chicago,…

Google tracks you to "customize search results" and I even have a 100% google'd phone (Pixel) but when I'm searching for restaurants it still shows me stuff from portland oregon instead of portland maine. This despite literally having my "Home" marked in my google account as portland maine.

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

#526

Post by dannysullivan »

mrguyorama wrote: post #520
bagacrap wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually work for our search quality team, and my job is to foster two-way communication between the search quality team and those outside Google. When issues come up outside Google, I try to explain what's happened to the best I can. I bring feedback into the search quality team and Google Search generally to help foster potential improvements we can make.

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

#527

Post by dannysullivan »

mrguyorama wrote: post #513
dannysullivan wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is. Which is why I specifically talked only about writing for algorithmic systems. Machine learning systems are different, and not everyone fully understands how they work, only that they do and can be influenced.

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

#528

Post by mrguyorama »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #421
TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google still needs to crawl them to see the noindex tag. And when Google is crawling a lot of pages on your site, it'll be slow.

This is only an issue if you have millions of pages Also, it will slow down the crawl frequency if you noindex it So it's a non problem

>This is only an issue if you have millions of pages

You know, like a news website that's been on the internet since the 90s

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

#529

Post by lostmsu »

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…

So they should stop doing this on pages that they are deleting now.

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

#530

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

dannysullivan wrote: post #514
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…

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…

Suppose CNET published an article about LK99 a week ago, then they published another article an hour ago. If Google hasn’t indexed the new article yet, won’t CNET rank lower on a search for “LK99” because the only matching page is a week old?

If by pruning old content, CNET can get its new articles in the results faster, it seems this would get CNET higher rankings and more traffic. Google doesn’t need to have a ranking system directly measuring the average age of content on the site for the net effect of Google’s systems to produce that effect. “Indexing and ranking are two different things” is an important implementation detail, but CNET cares about the outcome, which is whether they can show up at the top of the results page.

>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.

The answer is phrased like a denial, but it’s all caveated by the uncertainty communicated here. Which, like in the quote from CNET, could determine whether Google effectively considers the articles they are publishing “fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results”.

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