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Blogwashing

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Re: Blogwashing

#41

Post by code_duck »

swalsh wrote: post #14
nicoburns wrote: post #3

Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

When I'm looking for a book, I usually look for older but still popular books. New but highly rated books are hit or miss, but those old ones that people still recommend have consistently been great reads.

I have missed so much media over the past 20 years that I operate like this. I'm not concerned with whether music or games are new or not. Media that came out 5 or 15 years ago is just as new to me as something that came out this year, and there's a much larger selection.

Re: Blogwashing

#43

Post by ravivyas »

zo1 wrote: post #37
ravivyas wrote: post #7

Actually, a lot of sites keep updated posts with new information, which is useful. Which I believe makes it harder for Google to figure out who is gaming SEO and who are providing actual value.

How so? Could they not ML-detect the main body/content of the post and do a simple diff to previous "crawls" of the same content? You would think this gets picked up and somehow "resolved" because it's essentially a duplicate post or entry in their crawled pages DB.

If there is just a change in date and no change in content it could. But if the content changed, Google may not directly be able to state if the content was useful or not.

Re: Blogwashing

#44

Post by bagacrap »

pjc50 wrote: post #2

Not a particularly detailed post and, as it says, it's an old SEO trick. But if people want an answer as to why the blogosphere is dead and everything's on centralised silos: this is why. Any decentralised system that doesn't take spamfighting into account from the beginning will drown under it as soon as it becomes popular.

Is the blogosphere dead though? I see links to tons of previously unknown to me blogs on this site. The community has moderated the spam out. Thanks guys!

Re: Blogwashing

#45

Post by endorphone »

nicoburns wrote: post #3

Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

Or they didn't change because the author moved on to other things. So their article is full of obsolete information, comparisons are no longer relevant, old APIs, invalid syntax, incorrect library assumptions, etc.

When I search for anything technical the first thing I do is change the date range to the past year.

Re: Blogwashing

#46

Post by istjohn »

tambourine_man wrote: post #23
codingslave wrote: post #15

Search is just getting worse and worse, its a problem that probably nobody can solve with the current paradigm. I think in a few years there will be a significant opening in the search market for an algorithm that manages to structure information differently

Or, some public database of the crawled web where we can apply our own algorithm. I've always dreamed of a grep for the web, for instance. Trying to Google for code is a pain, even when quoted/verbatim.

This exists: commoncrawl.org

Re: Blogwashing

#47

Post by hombre_fatal »

ThrowAway54769 wrote: post #29
nicoburns wrote: post #3

Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

How is this Googles fault? They’re just following the market. People want “modern” information. They don’t want old stuff from two years ago.

Well, you'd expect Google to have some defenses against this sort of attack the same way they penalize keyword stuffing and cloaking.

But for all we know, they do. The TFA doesn't establish otherwise. It doesn't even establish that the author didn't update the content in June. Or that the blog unfairly ranked over better candidates.

Re: Blogwashing

#48

Post by golergka »

bagacrap wrote: post #44
pjc50 wrote: post #2

Not a particularly detailed post and, as it says, it's an old SEO trick. But if people want an answer as to why the blogosphere is dead and everything's on centralised silos: this is why. Any decentralised system that doesn't take spamfighting into account from the beginning will drown under it as soon as it becomes popular.

Is the blogosphere dead though? I see links to tons of previously unknown to me blogs on this site. The community has moderated the spam out. Thanks guys!

This site is a centralized system in some sense though?... As in, centralized source of moderation and authority, at least.

Re: Blogwashing

#49

Post by hombre_fatal »

nicoburns wrote: post #3

Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

I don't think your comment follows from the evidence presented by the author.

For example, the blog didn't even beat out the result above it which is "older content". For all we know, the blog was the last relevant candidate for that search query, the author doesn't demonstrate otherwise.

The only spammy thing we can tell from TFA is that the blog post's publish-date is set in 2019 when it was clearly published in 2016. But we don't know if Google knows that and is already penalizing them. Nor if it's an effective attack.

Also, the author doesn't demonstrate that the modified-date is inaccurate or spammy. CMS software will update this if you go back and correct a typo, or somehow mass-transform a bunch of blog posts. For instance, I once had a dead-link-finder plugin on Wordpress that gave me a UI to patch urls in old blog posts that would have updated the modified-date on all affected posts.

I don't see anything in TFA that suggests that the blog was benefiting from spammy behavior.

Re: Blogwashing

#50

Post by pmlnr »

nicoburns wrote: post #3

Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

It is Google's fault. So were those when you could rank no.1 for a term without having the term on the page because the links pointing at the site had them inside the .
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