Hopefully they'll get artificial penalty for gaming the system.
CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
281–290 of 592 posts
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#282This 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.
Librians regularly cull books. Magazines are cleared off the newstands weekly or monthly. Storing and indexing and maintaining old content isn't free, in either dollars or environmental footprint.
>Storing and indexing and maintaining old content isn't free, in either dollars or environmental footprint.
It's pretty close to free.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#283Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#284Is the fact that CNET deleting old articles improving its Google Search ranking? I'd say so, it's all over the news now.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#285So 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?
To be fair, the old internet wasn't killed. It just passed away. The curious voices that were prevalent back then are buried now.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#286Earlier 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…
The tweet is also clearly saying that deleting old content will increase the average page rank of your articles in the first N hours after it is published. (Because the time to first crawl will decrease, and the page rank is effectively zero before the first crawl). CNet is big enough that I’d expect Google to ensure the crawler has fresh news articles from it, but that isn’t explicitly said anywhere.
And considering all the AI hype, one could have hoped that the leading search engine crawler would be able to "smartly" detect new contents based on a url containing a timestamp.
Apparently not if this SEO trick is really a thing...
EDIT : sorry my bad it's actually the opposite. One could expect that a site like CNET would include a timestamp and a unique ID in their URL in 2023. This seems to be the "unpermalink" of a recent cnet article.
Maybe the SEO expert could have started there...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/samsung-galaxy-z-flip-5-rev...
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or mayhap Google et al could realize and understand that having old articles in archive shouldn't penalize your ranking.
Yep. Also, the days of the "Advanced Search" page have passed, but Google still has time range options under the "Tools" button near the top of the results page. If they're giving the user the option to filter results by time, then it's pretty goofy for the algorithm to de-rank a site in results where the the default of "Any time" was selected in the query just because the site has old articles in the index.
I'm afraid that, as so often with any topic, the vast majority of users never or rarely uses the time filter and so everything gets optimized for the users to dumb to search properly.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google actually describes an entirely plausible mechanism of action here at [1]. old content slows down site crawling, which can cause new content to not be refreshed as often. Sure, one page doesn’t matter, but thousands will. [1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129...
It says it doesn't affect ranking and their quote tweet is even more explicit https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689297947740295168
Dude, like who is google? The judicial system of the web?
No. Google has their own motivations here, they are a player not a rule maker.
Don’t trust SEOs as no one actually knows what works, but certainly dont think google is telling you the absolute truth.
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#289That's not a behaviour we would like to encourage, right?
Re: CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
#290There can be many reasons for this from SEO point of view. One of them can be to send Link Juice to the pages they want to rank better (May be because those pages bring more advertising revenue or being new don't have enough backlinks.) So let's say you have old pages which have good amount of backlinks but the stale content is not bringing enough visitors to your site. So you can delete those pages and permanently redirect them to new pages. This way the new page will get a Link Juice boost and it will perform better in search results.