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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

#541

Post by hathchip »

jrockway wrote: post #501
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…

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 wan…

It doesn't have to be a literal conspiracy. Why do you reject the possibility that people and organizations are reacting to very real and concrete financial incentives which clearly exist?

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

#542

Post by Dalewyn »

mannerheim wrote: post #440
Dalewyn wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already alluded[1] to the incentives for the host to minify their JavaShit, et al., and you would have a point if it wasn't for the fact that performance otherwise isn't significantly different between minified and full source code as far as the user would be concerned. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37072473

>JavaShit Glad to see the diversity of HN readers apparently includes twelve year olds. Anyway, you do realise plenty of languages have compilers with JS as a compilation target, right? How readable do you think that is?

>Glad to see the diversity of HN readers apparently includes twelve year olds.

The abuse of JavaScript does not deserve the respect of being called by a proper name.

>Anyway, you do realise plenty of languages have compilers with JS as a compilation target, right? How readable do you think that is?

If you're going to run "compiled" code through an interpreter anyway, is that really compiled code?

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

#543

Post by Cheezewheel »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #466
dannysullivan wrote: post #460

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.

You are also talking to someone who is on the PR team. This term gets thrown out a lot but in this case it is factually true, you are literally talking to a shill. I mean no disrespect to Danny but you are not going to get an honest and straightforward answer out of him.

If you think I am exaggerating, try to prompt him to see if you can get him to acknowledge that Googles current systems incentivize SEO spam. See if he passes the Turing test.

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

#544

Post by dbbk »

cratermoon wrote: post #190
barbariangrunge wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real reason: hiding it from ai scrapers?

Underrated comment. This has to be part of it.

If it were truly just about Google rankings they would noindex the pages

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

#545

Post by jrockway »

hathchip wrote: post #541
jrockway wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wan…

It doesn't have to be a literal conspiracy. Why do you reject the possibility that people and organizations are reacting to very real and concrete financial incentives which clearly exist?

Certainly there are a lot of people that stretch their videos out to put in more ads, but not everyone with a long video is playing some metrics optimization game. They're just bad at editing.

I think the situation that people run into is something like "how do I install a faucet" and they are getting someone who does it for a living explaining it for the first time. Explaining it for the first time is what makes it tough to make a good video. Then there are other things like "top 10 AskReddit threads that I feel like stealing from this week" and those are too long because they are just trying to get as much ad revenue as possible. The original comment was about howtos specifically, and I think you are likely to run into a lot of one-off channels in those cases.

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

#546

Post by dorkwood »

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…

There’s a channel that explains how to pronounce words that is a particularly bad offender. They talk about the history of the word up front, but without ever actually saying the word. They only pronounce it in the last few seconds, right as the thumbnail overlay appears.

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

#547

Post by seabass-labrax »

0x0203 wrote: post #516
mcpackieh wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

uBlock Origin is my extension of choice for this. It makes it really easy to block those distractions, and there are quite a few pre-existing filters to choose from.

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

#548

Post by joe_the_user »

dannysullivan wrote: post #467
TheKarateKid wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We've been diligently working to improve the results through things like our helpful content system, and that work is continuing. You can read about some of it in a recent post here (and it also describes the Perspectives feature that's live on mobile): https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-perspectiv...

My strong impression is that in the last two years there a couple change were rolled out to search that sent it straight into the sewer - search seemed to be tweaked to crassly, crudely put any product name above anything else in the searches. But since then, it seems like quality has crept back up again. Simple product terms still get top billing but more complicated searches aren't nerfed.

So it seems the search quality team exists but gets locked on in the closet by advertising periodically.

I know you can't verify anything directly but maybe we could set a system of code for you to communicate what's really happening...

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

#549

Post by Capricorn2481 »

mthoms wrote: post #523
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you choose to throw yourself on a public forum doing PR for a company doing dumb things and you also insult everyone's intelligence by lying to them, people are gonna be a little rude

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

#550

Post by antod »

jrockway wrote: post #503
chankstein38 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 speak…

> What's great about writing is that readers can go at their own pace.

100%, and you can skim it so that your pace subconsciously varies depending on how relevant or complex that section is.

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