551–560 of 592 posts
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?
This is such terrible, low-quality, manipulative content. It does not belong on HN.
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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
Eventually Google stops crawling noindexed pages.
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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…
Making a long video isn't like writing a rambling letter. It takes work to make 10 minutes of talk out of a 1-minute subject. And mega-popular influencers do this, not just newbs who haven't learned how to edit properly yet.
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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.
If someone releases only a minified version of their code, and licenses it as free as can be, is it open source?
> The program must include source code [...] The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor [...] are not allowed.
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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 get no random ad content which just cut into the feed at will, which makes for a somewhat better experience. But there's the inevitable "NordVPN will guarantee your privacy", "" ad.
There is no escape. I actually pay for YT premium and it's SO much better than being interrupted by ads for probiotic yoghurt or whatever. I know there are a couple of plugins out there which I have not tried (I think nosponsors is one of them) but I really don't think there is any escape from this stuff.
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So whose word do we have to go on that this is beneficial, besides anonymous "SEO experts" and CNET leadership (those paragons of journalistic savvy)? Perhaps what CNET really means is that they're deleting old low quality content with high bounce rates. After all, the best SEO is actually having the thing users want.
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.
I assume Google is turning all the site's pages, js, inbound/outbound links, traffic patterns, etc...into large numbers of sometimes obscure datapoints like "does it have a favicon", "is it a unique favicon?", "do people scroll past the initial viewport?", "does it have this known uncommon attribute?".
Maybe those aren't the right guesses, but if a page has thousands of derived features and attributes, maybe they are on the list.
So, some SEO's take the idea that they can identify sites that Google clearly showers with traffic, and try to recreate as close a list of those features/attributes as they can for the site they are being paid to boost.
I agree it's an odd approach, but I also can't prove it's wrong.
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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.
Do you have an example of a video that does this? Seems like an interesting problem to solve.
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Then you could also block those pages in robots.txt, no? (You do need to do both though, as otherwise pages can be indexed based on links, without being crawled.)
Exactly. This should be solvable without actually deleting the pages. I assume they're only removing articles with near-zero backlinks, so a noindex,nofollow should generally be fine, but if crawl budget is an issue robots.txt and sitemap can help.
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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…
What makes this worse is that there's an increasing trend for how-tos to be only available on video. As someone who learns best by reading, I'm already at a disadvantage with video to begin with. To make it worse, instructional videos tend to omit a great deal of detail in the interest of time. Then when you add nonsense like you're pointing out, it makes the whole thing a frustrating and pointless activity.