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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

#361

Post by iamacyborg »

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.

I mean, ideally you just have both an absolute and a calculated value to ensure both trend in the right direction.

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

#362

Post by mrd3v0 »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #160

Since everyone's reacting to the headline and hasn't read The Fine Article... Please let me call attention to the linked tweet from Google explicitly saying don't do this. > Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing! Our guidance doesn't encourage this. Older content can still be helpful, too. https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689…

And? I really do not get how a tweet from Google contradicts the fact that their search engine is hot garbage that incentivises spam, centralised silos and "SEO tricks" like what CNET is doing.

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

#364

Post by Aerbil313 »

nologic01 wrote: post #337

Imagine, if you will, an utopic world where a critical service such as finding anything is not dominated by one (1) entity but an actual number - such as ten (10). Sci-fi novels describe this hypothetical market structure as a "competitive market". In this utopic arrangement, users of search services are more-or-less evenly distributed among different search providers, enjoying a variety of different takes on how to…

Search is an inherently centralizing and monopolizing industry. The one with the biggest index can show the best results and ads, thus has the biggest budget, and the one with the biggest budget has the biggest index.

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

#365

Post by ElongatedMusket »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #335
SahAssar wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One SEO expert who consulted for a bank I worked at wanted us to change our URLs from e.g. /products/savings-accounts/apply by reversing them to /apply/savings-accounts/products on the grounds that the most specific thing about the page must be as close to the domain name as possible, according to them. I actually went ahead and changed our CMS to implement this (because I was told to). I'm sure the SEO expert got pa…

But that's wrong... Do breadcrumbs get larger as you move away from the loaf? No!

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

#366

Post by Aerbil313 »

goodbyesf wrote: post #145
jprd wrote: post #2

Bad. Antithetical to both Google's original ideals and the early 'netzien goals. Google's deteriorating performance shouldn't result in deleting valuable historical viewpoints, journalistic trends and research material just to raise your newly AI-generated sh1t to the top of the trash fire.

> Bad. Antithetical to both Google's original ideals and the early 'netzien goals. At this point, we should all realize that every ideal and slogan spouted by tech companies is just marketing. We were just too young and naive to know any better. 'Don't be evil'. In hindsight, that should have set off alarm bells.

Yeah, truly. "Don't be evil"? Like, you want to be evil, or you tend to be evil, but just don't do it?

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

#367

Post by notpushkin »

hunter2_ wrote: post #223
naniwaduni wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The ISA bytecode is the source from which the processor ultimately executes a program, so yes that is source code."

I suppose the difference is that someone debugging at that level will be offered some sort of "dump" command or similar, whereas someone debugging in a browser is offered a "View Source" command. It's just a matter of convention and expectation. If we wanted browsers to be fed code that for performance reasons isn't human-readable, web servers ought to serve something that's processed way more than just gzipped minif…

I find myself using View Source sometimes, too, but more often I just use devtools, which shows DOM as a readable tree even if source is minified.

I'm actually all for binary HTML – not just it's smaller, it can also be easier to parse, and makes more sense overall nowadays.

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

#368

Post by flusensieb »

panzi wrote: post #255
hunter2_ wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the difference is that someone debugging at that level will be offered some sort of "dump" command or similar, whereas someone debugging in a browser is offered a "View Source" command. It's just a matter of convention and expectation. If we wanted browsers to be fed code that for performance reasons isn't human-readable, web servers ought to serve something that's processed way more than just gzipped minif…

If you need to use prettiefy to even have a chance to understand the code, is it still source code? About the byte code: You mean wasm? (Guess that's what you're alluding to.)

If you need syntax highlighting and an easy way to navigate between files to understand a large code base, is it still source code?

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

#369

Post by orangepurple »

demizer wrote: post #80
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #20

One of my favourite websites growing up: download.com

When download.com became infested with ad ware was a sad day. I used to visit that site a lot to see what cool software I could install. Thank the heavens for Linux for teaching me proper package management.

If you're on Windows you can try Scoop https://scoop.sh/#/apps

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

#370

Post by oneshtein »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #335
SahAssar wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One SEO expert who consulted for a bank I worked at wanted us to change our URLs from e.g. /products/savings-accounts/apply by reversing them to /apply/savings-accounts/products on the grounds that the most specific thing about the page must be as close to the domain name as possible, according to them. I actually went ahead and changed our CMS to implement this (because I was told to). I'm sure the SEO expert got pa…

It's just a URL rewrite rule for nginx proxy.
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