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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

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. All this is saying that you do not write any code for the search algorithms. Do you know how to code? Do you have access to those repos internally? Do you read them regularly? Or are you only aware of what people tell you in meetings about it.

Your job is not to disseminate accurate information about how the algorithm works but rather to disseminate information that google has decided it wants people to know. Those are two extremely different things in this context.

I work on these kind of vague "algorithm" style products in my job, and I know that unless you are knee deep in it day to day, you have zero understanding of what it ACTUALLY does, what it ACTUALLY rewards, what it ACTUALLY punishes, which can be very different from what you were hoping it would reward and punish when you build and train it. Machine learning still does not have the kind of explanatory power to do any better than that.

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

#532

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…

Making statements that you wish publishers wouldn't do various things, doesn't change the actual incentives that the real-world ranking algorithms create for them.

I mean, saying that you should design pages for people rather than the search engine clearly hasn't shut down the SEO industry.

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

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. All this is saying that you do not write any code for the search algorithms. Do you know how to code? Do you have access to those repos internally? Do you read them regularly? Or are you only aware of what people tell you in meetings about it. Your job is not to disseminate accurate information about how the algorithm works but rather to disseminate information that google has decided it wants people to know. Th…

No. I don't code. I'm not an engineer. That doesn't mean I can't communicate how Google Search works. And our systems do not calculate how much "old" content is on a site to determine if it is "fresh" enough to rank better. The engineers I work with reading about all this today find it strange anyone thinks this.

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

#534

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.

Don't kick the messenger. It's already good that someone (allegedly) from a department related to the situation could give some input. No need to dump all your frustrations on them

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

#535
post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience usually the bigger difference is made by not making it bloated in the first place... As well as progressive enhancement, nonblocking load, serving from a nearby geolocation etc. I see projects minify all the things by default while it should be literally the last measure with least impact on TTI

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

#536
post #445
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…

This has been going on for about a decade now. This alone has caused me to remove myself from Google's products and services. They have unilaterally made the internet worse.

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

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One SEO expert who consulted for a bank I worked at wanted us to change our URLs from e.g. /products/savings-accounts/apply by reversing them to /apply/savings-accounts/products on the grounds that the most specific thing about the page must be as close to the domain name as possible, according to them. I actually went ahead and changed our CMS to implement this (because I was told to). I'm sure the SEO expert got pa…

Unfortunately though, this was likely good advice. The yandex source code leak revealed that keyword proximity to root domain is a ranking factor. Of course, there’s nearly a thousand factors and “randomize result” is also a factor, but still. SEO is unfortunately a zero sum game so it makes otherwise silly activities become positive ROI.

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

#538

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?

Can Google tell the difference between old relevant information and old irrelevant (or outdated) information? I'm not seeing any evidence of that. A search engine is not a subject matter expert of everything on the Internet, and it shouldn't be.

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm pretty sure Google is smart enough to recognize the main content of a page, and ignore things like widgets and navigation. That's Search Engine 101.

Yes, of course, but that analysis happens after the content has been visited by the bot. It’s still a visit, and still hits the “crawl budget.”

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

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rank…

You're asking about freshness, not oldness. IE: we have systems that are designed to show fresh content, relatively speaking -- matter of days. It's not the same as "this article is from 2005 so it's old don't show it." And it's also not what is being generally being discussed in getting rid of "old" content. And also, especially for sites publishing a lot of fresh content, we get that really fast already. It's essential part of how we gather news links, for example. And and and -- even with freshness, it's not "newest article ranks first" because we have systems that try to show the original "fresh" content or sometimes a slightly older piece is still more relevant. Here's a page that explains more ranking systems we have that deal with both original content and fresh content: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking...
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