181–190 of 592 posts
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> 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!"
Just because someone says water isn't wet doesn't mean water isn't wet.
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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.
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> 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.
This is not the same as saying that it doesn't prioritize newer pages over older pages in the search results.
The way it's worded does sound like it could imply the latter thing, but that may have just been poor writing.
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And you're probably out of support and aren't a current paying customer so you're a lower priority than current customers that want current information. (Old information is often available on product support sites but it probably won't come up with a random search.)
When I worked at $MAJOR_VENDOR, we had an internal-only archive of product installation and documentation ISOs for old versions, discontinued products, etc. It didn't go back forever (although apparently some even older stuff was archived offline and could be retrieved on request), but it did contain product versions that had been out-of-support for over a decade. A lot of older material which had been removed from t…
So, while there may be some historical interest in how we were talking about, say, cloud computing in 2010, that's the kind of thing I keep in my personal files and generally wouldn't expect a company to keep searchable on its web site.
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Just because someone says water isn't wet doesn't mean water isn't wet.
The contrived problem of trusting authority can be easily resolved by trusting authority
-George Orwell, 1984
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Heck, sometimes that answer is even correct!
I have been recently forking off a subproject from Git repo. After spending a lot of time messing around with it and getting into a lot of unforeseen trouble, I finally asked ChatGPT how to do it and of course ChatGPT knew the correct answer all along. I felt like an idiot. Now I always ask ChatGPT first. These LLMs are way smarter than you would think. GPT4 with WolframAlpha plugin even gave me enough information to…
But now I'm curious!
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When I worked at $MAJOR_VENDOR, we had an internal-only archive of product installation and documentation ISOs for old versions, discontinued products, etc. It didn't go back forever (although apparently some even older stuff was archived offline and could be retrieved on request), but it did contain product versions that had been out-of-support for over a decade. A lot of older material which had been removed from t…
And for product documentation for version n-2.x, it's easy enough to see the use case for why a customer might need it. (e.g. they have some other product that's version locked to it) But there is a ton of collateral, videos, etc. that companies produce that get stale, musty, or just plain wrong and if you leave them all out there it's just a mess that's now up to the customer to decide what's right, what's mostly ri…
That 2017 product roadmap slide saying "we'll deliver X version N+1 by 2020" gets a bit embarrassing when 2023 rolls around and it is still nowhere to be seen. Maybe the real answer is "X wasn't making enough money so the new version was cancelled", but you don't want to publicly announce that (what will the press make of it?), you just hope everyone forgets you ever promised it. You can't get rid of copies of the slide deck your sales people emailed to customers, or you presented at a conference, or in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine – but at least you can nuke it off your own website. Reduces the odds of being publicly embarrassed by the whole thing.
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That only says that Google discourages such actions, not that such actions are not beneficial to SEO ranking (which is equal to the aforementioned economic incentive in this case).
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.
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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
This is another problem of the entire SEO industry. Websites trust these SEO consultants and growth hackers more than they trust information from Google itself. Somehow, it becomes widely accepted that the best information on Google ranking is from those third parties but not Google.
Google has a vested interest in creating a good web experience. Consultants have an interest in making their clients money.
Link building is a classic example where good consultants deliver value. (There are bad consultants than good ones though)
This is some bullshit. It’s bad enough that a lot of sites with content going back 10-20 years have linkrot or have simply gone offline. But I am at a loss for words that they’re disappearing content on purpose just for SEO rankings. If this is what online publishing has come to we have seriously screwed up.
The real reason: hiding it from ai scrapers?