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

theverge.com

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

#41

Post by Espionage724 »

LordShredda wrote: post #33
sydbarrett74 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: 'Stories slated to be “deprecated” are archived using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and authors are alerted at least 10 days in advance, according to the memo.'

Offloading trash to an already strained organisation. are they donating any help or is it just taking advantage of charity?

Lmao there's no winning with you people :p

Don't worry, Wayback is capable of telling CNET where to go if they were really concerned. If anything they should be thankful for the newly-generated interest that a major company would use them instead of some randoms cherry-picking sites for arguments.

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

#42

Post by tedunangst »

burnhamup wrote: post #15
crazygringo wrote: post #7

Is there any evidence this would even work? Surely Google determines "fresh, relevant" content according to whatever has recently been published, which this doesn't change. If anything, doesn't Google consider sites with a long history of content with tons of inbound links as more authoritative and therefore higher-ranked? This baffles me. It baffles me why this would be successful SEO -- and assuming that it actuall…

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…

How does Wikipedia manage to remain indexed?

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

#43

Post by bhandziuk »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #26
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…

Even if that rule were true, why wouldn’t everything in the say, top NNN internet sites get an exemption? It is the Internet’s most hit content, why would it not be exhaustively indexed? Alternatively, other than ads, what is changing on a CNN article from 10 years ago? Why would that still be getting daily scans?

CNET* not CNN. But everything you say is still true.

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

#44

Post by ta988 »

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?

move the old articles to another domain or non indexed pages.

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

#45

Post by ghaff »

flangola7 wrote: post #37
ghaff wrote: post #31

While it would be nice to believe that search engines solve the issue automagically, there are a lot of reasons why organizations want to reduce they amount of old/outdated/stale information that's served to searchers. I know where I work, we're constantly deleting older material (at least for certain types of content--which news and quasi-news pubs doesn't necessarily fall into).

What reasons would there to be to delete old new articles? My inner historian is screaming.

Companies are not, in general, in the business of being the archive of record. They're, among other things, in the business of providing their current customers with the information that's most applicable and correct for their current needs and not something relevant to a completely different version of software from 10 years ago.

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

#46

Post by kenjackson »

ta988 wrote: post #44
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?

move the old articles to another domain or non indexed pages.

That's what the article says they're doing.

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

#47

Post by 1123581321 »

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?

I'd rather see them address it with a more complicated approach that preserves the old content. For example, they could move it to an unindexed search archive while they rework it to have more useful structures, associations and other taxonomy.

The approach to just move it to another domain and be done suggests it's not well enough researched for what an organization their size could manage.

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

#48

Post by glenngillen »

It's things like this that make me really want to see some of the alternative search engines succeed. Hopefully Google continues shooting itself in the foot enough to make people seek alternatives. FWIW I'm using Kagi and have been very happy with it. It's the only alternative I've used (including numerous failed attempts to switch to DDG) where the results have been good enough that I haven't developed a muscle memory to resort back to Google results. And I consider the amount I have to pay to use it reasonable for the value I get, but also an investment in a potential future that doesn't have us all beholden to Google.

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

#49

Post by JohnFen »

_jal wrote: post #17

They're also using LLMs to write articles. I don't understand why they think I or anyone else won't just skip the part where they lard it up with ads and just talk to the robot directly.

Or just skip CNET entirely. They haven't been worthwhile for a very long time.

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

#50

Post by skissane »

tedunangst wrote: post #42
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…

How does Wikipedia manage to remain indexed?

Very likely Google special-cases Wikipedia
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