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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

#381

Post by chimprich »

kenjackson wrote: post #36
jzb wrote: post #29

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.

In fairness to them. If one of their top ways of getting traffic is being marked as less relevant because of older articles, what do you want them to do? Just continue to lose money because Google can't rank them appropriately?

> In fairness to them [...] what do you want them to do? Just continue to lose money

How come CNET is getting a free pass here to do something obnoxious because they're losing money, but Google is getting the stick for (maybe) doing something obnoxious to avoid losing money?

I think Google do a lot of bad stuff but let's at least assign blame proportionally.

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

#382

Post by darkmarmot »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #360
basicoperation wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, people often forget that if your target is a ratio, you can attack the numerator or the denominator. Often the latter is the easier to manipulate.

Even if it's not a ratio. When any metric becomes a target it will be gamed. My organization tracks how many tickets we have had open for 30 days or more. So my team started to close tickets after 30 days and let them reopen automatically.

Lower death rate in hospitals by sending sick people to hospice! https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctors-say-hca-h...

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

#383

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #140
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?

They could just noindex them.

Google still needs to crawl them to see the noindex tag. And when Google is crawling a lot of pages on your site, it'll be slow.

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

#384

Post by SahAssar »

oneshtein wrote: post #370
adrianmsmith wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you want all your canonical urls to be wrong and every navigation to include a redirect, sure.

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

#385

Post by gmerc »

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 don’t know man, I read it but I’ve learned to judge big tech talk purely by their actions and I don’t think there’s a lot of incentive built into their system that supports this statement.

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

#386

Post by bonoboTP »

They have no obligation to serve old stuff indefinitely. If you like an article, it's on you to save it, just like people in the old times would keep newspaper cutouts about their favorite band and VHS cassettes of interviews etc.

Yes, things are becoming ephemeral. Probably good. Been like that forever except for some naive time window of strange expectations in the 2000s decade. We shouldn't keep rolling ahead of us a growing ball of useless stuff. Shed the the useless and keep the valuable. If nobody remembers otherwise, then probably it's not a thing of value.

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

#387

Post by zirgs »

bonoboTP wrote: post #386

They have no obligation to serve old stuff indefinitely. If you like an article, it's on you to save it, just like people in the old times would keep newspaper cutouts about their favorite band and VHS cassettes of interviews etc. Yes, things are becoming ephemeral. Probably good. Been like that forever except for some naive time window of strange expectations in the 2000s decade. We shouldn't keep rolling ahead of u…

The problem is that it's no longer possible to find it. Lots of early internet history is lost or hard to find - despite the fact that storage space is not an issue these days.

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

#388

Post by zirgs »

MrVandemar wrote: post #273
jzb wrote: post #29

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.

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.

You can store the whole wikipedia on a single SD card these days. Storage space is not a problem.

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

#389

Post by jrochkind1 »

throw0101a wrote: post #85
burnhamup wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory I've heard is related to 'crawl budget'. Google is only going to devote a finite amount of time to indexing your site. If the number of articles on your site exceeds that time, some portion of your site won't be indexed. So by 'pruning' undesirable pages, you might boost attention on the articles you want indexed. No clue how this ends up working in practice. Google's suggestion isn't to delete pages, but…

> The theory I've heard is related to 'crawl budget'. Google is only going to devote a finite amount of time to indexing your site. Once a site has been indexed once, should it really be crawled again? Perhaps Google should search for RSS/Atom feeds on sites and poll those regularly for updates: that way they don't waste time doing to a site scrape multiple times. Old(er) articles, once crawled, don't really have to…

The SiteMap, which was invented by Google and designed to give information to crawlers, already includes last-updated info.

No need to invent a new system based on RSS/Atom, there is already an actually existing and in-use system based on SiteMap.

So, what you suggest is already happening -- or at least, the system is already there for it to happen. It's possible Google does not trust the last modified info given by site owners enough, or for other reasons does not use your suggested approach, I can't say.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

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

#390

Post by chaos986 »

SEO is a scam run by con artists. Google's worth as a search engine is it's ability to rank pages by quality. SEO tries to fake quality or trick Google to ranking objectively bad sites higher.

Red Ventures is trying to get CNET to be worse. with this and the AI written stories. Google should react by delisting all of CNET.

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