51–60 of 592 posts
I've seen a couple news sources that are altering their publish dates to show near the top of news feeds. Google will announce "3 hours old", despite being weeks old.
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?
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engines solve the issue automagically, there are a lot of reasons why organizations want to reduce they amount of old/outdated/stale information that's served to searchers.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.
I’m sure there must be some way to fix this with META tags/etc, but it is often easier just to delete the old stuff, than change the META tags on 100s or 1000s of legacy doc pages
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move the old articles to another domain or non indexed pages.
That's what the article says they're doing.
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…
That's for stuff like large e-commerce sites with constantly changing product info.
Google is clear that if your content doesn't change often (in the way that news articles don't), then crawl budget is irrelevant.
I haven't visited a CNET page in years and didn't know they were even still relevant :p The times I have visited CNET pages in the past was to find specific information. If such information happens to be in deleted articles, that would reduce my interactions with CNET in the future. I think they should archive the old articles or even offload them to Wayback willingly, but it's possible some of the articles they're p…
> I haven't visited a CNET page in years and didn't know they were even still relevant :p I had the same feeling about the Verge. It feels like going to Britannica online to read about what Encarta encyclopaedia was and why it came in something called a CD-ROM. --- E: Awesome: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Encarta
I’ve seen people use Britannica Online as ammunition in arguments on Wikipedia. “Britannica says/does X so Wikipedia should too”
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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?
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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?
Wikipedia had a long tail of low-value content, but even the low-value content tends to be among the highest value for its given focus. e.g., I don't know how many people search "Danish trade monopoly in Iceland", and the Wikipedia article on it isn't fantastic, but it's a pretty good start[0]. Good enough to serve up as the main snippet on Google.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_trade_monopoly_in_Icela...
That's what I moved to ChatGPT4 for most of my info queries. Google is badly compromised by SEO. Plus ChatGPT4 gives answer right away within having to go through multiple results and search within each page for specific line I need.
Heck, sometimes that answer is even correct!