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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

#321

Post by dragonwriter »

hliyan wrote: post #314
pessimizer wrote: post #68

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?

Before someone suggests a new search engine where the ranking algorithm is replaced with AI, I would like to propose a return to human-curated directories. Yahoo had one, and for a while, so did Google. It was pre-social-media and pre-wiki, so none of these directories were optimized to take advantage of crowdsourcing. Perhaps it's time to try again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Directory

> Before someone suggests a new search engine where the ranking algorithm is replaced with AI, I would like to propose a return to human-curated directories. Yahoo had one, and for a while, so did Google. It was pre-social-media and pre-wiki, so none of these directories were optimized to take advantage of crowdsourcing.

False. Google Directory (and many other major name, mostly now defunct, web directories) were powered by data from DMOZ which was crowdsourced (and kind of still is, through Curlie [0] and while some parts of the website show updated as recently as today, enough fairly core links are dead or without content that its pretty obviously not a thriving operation.) Also, it was not pre-Wiki: WikiWikiWeb was created in 1995, DMOZ in 1998. It was pre-Wikipedia, but Wikipedia wasn’t the first Wiki.

[0] https://curlie.org/

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

#323

Post by whstl »

rocqua wrote: post #295
Xelbair wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

simple. Split google's Ad part, with search part and chrome part. Because it's clearly bullshit at this point.

How could search survive? The business value of search is in providing data for ads, is it not?

I assume GP means to split Search but keep search ads, called "AdWords", together with it. The third-party advertisement part of Google was/is called AdSense. The two were always run separately AFAIK.

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

#324

Post by mediascreen »

bagacrap wrote: post #98
pessimizer wrote: post #68

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?

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

I few tweets down they qualify this, saying that it might improve some things like indexing of the rest of the site:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129

My understanding is that if you have a very large site, removing pages can sometimes help because:

- There is an indexing "budget" for your site. Removing pages might make reindexing of the rest of the pages faster.

- Removing pages that are cannibalising on each other might help the main page for the keywords to rank higher.

- Google is not very fond of "thin wide" content. Removing low quality pages can be helpful, especially if you don't have a lot of links to your site.

- Trimming the content of a website could make it easier for people and Google to understand what the site is about and help them find what they are looking for.

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

#325

Post by Cthulhu_ »

kccqzy wrote: post #108
bagacrap wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Websites trust these SEO consultants and growth hackers more than they trust information from Google itself.

That's because websites' goals and Google's goals are not aligned.

Websites want people to engage with their website, view ads, buy products, or do something else (e.g. buy a product, vote for a party). If old content does not or detracts from those goals, they and SEO experts say, it should go because it's dragging the rest down.

Google wants all the information and for people to watch their ads. Google likes the long tail; Google doesn't care if articles from the 90's are outdated because people looking at it (assuming the page runs Google ads) or searching for it (assuming they use Google) means impressions and therefore money for them.

Google favors quantity over quality, websites the other way around. To oversimplify and probably be incorrect.

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

#326

Post by midoridensha »

Dalewyn wrote: post #275
midoridensha wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I guess you think compiled code is even worse, right?

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.

Minifying code for browsers greatly reduces the amount of bandwidth needed to serve web traffic. There's a good reason it's done.

By your logic, there's actually no reason to use compiled code at all, for almost anything above the kernel. We can just use Python to do everything, including run browsers, play video games, etc. Sure, it'll be dog-slow, but you seem to care more about reading the code than performance or any other consideration.

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

#327

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bagacrap wrote: post #244
technion wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an awful lot of SEO people on Twitter that claim to be connected to Google, and the article he links on the Google domain as a reference doesn't say anything on the topic that I can find. I'm reluctant to call that an official source.

He claims to work for Google on X, LinkedIn, and his own website. I am inclined to believe him because I think he would have received a cease and desist by now otherwise.

Probably not; anyone can claim to work for these companies with no repercussions, because is it a crime? Maybe if they're pricks that lower these companies' public opinion (libel), but even that requires a civil suit.

But lying on the internet isn't a crime. I work for Google on quantum AI solutions in adtech btw.

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

#328

Post by zx10rse »

Highly doubt that this is for SEO purposes, serp does not work like that. Smell like a bad management decision, and probably some huge investment in an ai tool that needs to be justified monetarily. They will probably nuke a huge portion of their traffic, and loose a ton of backlinks.

If you genuinely strive to create a great content that piece of content will drive traffic, leads, sales, help for rankings and etc. for years.

Just by searching a random thing like "how to build an engine" the first article that comes, and the top results is from 1997.

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

#329

Post by Cthulhu_ »

hliyan wrote: post #314
pessimizer wrote: post #68

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?

Before someone suggests a new search engine where the ranking algorithm is replaced with AI, I would like to propose a return to human-curated directories. Yahoo had one, and for a while, so did Google. It was pre-social-media and pre-wiki, so none of these directories were optimized to take advantage of crowdsourcing. Perhaps it's time to try again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Directory

One issue there was that human-curated directories are everywhere. Hacker News is one. Reddit is another. And during the Yahoo times, directories were made everywhere and all over the place. Which one is authoritative? There's too much of them out there.

That said, in NL a lot of people's home pages for a long time was set to startpagina.nl, which was just that, a cool directory of websites that you could submit to the website. It seems to exist still, too.

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

#330

Post by cedilla »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #270
somedude895 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could imagine CNET‘s SEO team got an average rank goal instead of absolute SEO traffic. So by removing low ranked old pages the avg position of their search results goes closer to the top even though total traffic sinks. I‘ve seen stuff like this happen at my own company as well, where a team‘s KPIs are designed such that they‘ll ruin absolute numbers in order to achieve their relative KPI goals, like getting an in…

This is why KPIs or targets should NEVER be calculated values like averages or ratios. The team is then incentivized to do something hostile such as not promote the content as much so that the ratio is higher, as soon as they barely scrape past the impressions mark.

When deciding KPIs, Goodhart's law should always be kept in mind: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

It's really hard to not create perverse incentives with KPIs. Targets like "% of tickets closed within 72 hours" can wreck service quality if the team is under enough pressure or unscrupulous.

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