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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

#391

Post by zirgs »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #364
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.

Depends on what is in that index. If it's full of noise and spam then its results won't be very useful. Garbage in - garbage out.

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

#392

Post by bonoboTP »

zirgs wrote: post #387
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.

Maybe. I'm of two minds. Valuable things stand the test of time, they get retold and reused and remembered and kept alive. It's always been like that. On the other hand this could be construed as a defense of oral tradition above writing, but writing has had immense impact on our capabilities and technological progress historically, including the preservation of ancient texts. But I'm not sure we'd be so much better off if we had access to all the gossip news of the time of Plato. Not to mention that forgetting, retelling, rediscovering, discussing stuff anew allows for a kind of evolution and mutation that can regularize and robustify the knowledge.

So we need some preservation, but indiscriminate blind hoarding of all info isn't necessarily the best.

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

#393

Post by shortformblog »

technion wrote: post #178
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

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.

Journalist here. Danny Sullivan works for Google, but spent nearly 20 years working outside of Google as a fellow journalist in the SEO space before he was hired by the company.

He was the guy who replaced Matt Cutts.

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

#394

Post by naniwaduni »

hunter2_ wrote: post #298
Dalewyn wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If someone releases only a minified version of their code, and licenses it as free as can be, is it open source?

The popular licenses for which this is a design concern are careful to define source code to mean "preferred form of the work for making modifications" or similar.

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

#395

Post by shortformblog »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #327
bagacrap wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He’s been lying a long time, considering that he’s kept the lie up that he’s an expert on SEO for nearly 30 years at this point, and I’ve been following his work most of that time.

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

#396

Post by catboybotnet »

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

Hey, don't do that. That's bad. But if you keep doing it, you'll get better SEO. No, we won't do anything to prevent this from being a way to game SEO.

Words without action are useless.

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

#397

Post by Ensorceled »

chimprich wrote: post #381
kenjackson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because Google is a wildly profitable ad tech behemoth with a history of screwing over news companies and CNET is probably just trying to survive.

Do you really not see the power dynamics at play here?

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

#398

Post by Ensorceled »

chaos986 wrote: post #390

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.

The quality of Google’s search results have been in steady decline for years. Google’s worth as a search engine is mostly the value it accrues to advertisers with pinpoint user targeting at this point.

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

#399

Post by amf12 »

kristopolous wrote: post #170
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 feel like they presume I'm a gullible person they need to protect who is just on the Internet for shopping and watching entertainment. Wasn't the point of them tracking us so much to customize and cater our results? Why have they normalized everything to some focus group persona of Joe six-pack? *** Let's try an experiment Type in "Chicago ticket" which has at least 4 interpretations, a ticket to travel to Chicago,…

Or it know way too much. An alternative explanation for it could also be:

It knows you're in LA and did not look up "Chicago flight", so you probably aren't looking for flights there.

Chicago musical isn't playing in LA so probably not the right kind.

Probably why most people get parking ticket listed higher. It would be interesting to see the results in a city where the band, team or musical has an event soon.

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

#400

Post by jwie »

chaos986 wrote: post #390

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.

SEO won a long time ago. Google fights a hopeless war against legions of soulless locusts.

For all its resources it’s incapable of improving the situation. Since it only understands proxies of quality and truth, and these things can be manufactured and industrialized, they are incapable of winning.

Blogspam and fraud consistently outrank the original, and changes to the rules frustrate legitimate sites more than SEO spam. If anything these frequent changes increase the demand for SEO, not make it harder. You just wind up with more.

Until they figure out some kinda digital pesticide for SEO spam, the situation will continue to get worse.

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