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CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
- jprd 3y agoBad. Antithetical to both Google's original ideals and the early 'netzien goals. Google's deteriorating performance shouldn't result in deleting valuable historical viewpoints, journalistic trends and research material just to raise your newly AI-generated sh1t to the top of the trash fire.
- goodbyesf 3y ago> Bad. Antithetical to both Google's original ideals and the early 'netzien goals. At this point, we should all realize that every ideal and slogan spouted by tech companies is just marketing. We were just too young and naive to know any better. 'Don't be evil'. In hindsight, that should have set off alarm bells.
- Aerbil313 3y agoYeah, truly. "Don't be evil"? Like, you want to be evil, or you tend to be evil, but just don't do it?
- skilled 3y agoFunny timing, because Google said yesterday not to do this. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpful-content-35846.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpfu...
- winwang 3y agoAt the same time, is there any reason to trust them over empirical evidence (if there is evidence)? Incentives are incentivizing.
- ijustwanttovote 3y ago> https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpfu https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpfu... I think older articles will eventually hold more weight in Google Searches. There will be a before OpenAI vs after OpenAI weighting.
- pavon 3y agoThat reads like an attempt at a refutation that is actually a confirmation: > The page itself isn’t likely to rank well. Removing it might mean if you have a massive site that we’re better able to crawl other content on the site. But it doesn’t mean we go “oh, now the whole site is so much better” because of what happens with an individual page. > “Just because Google says that deleting content in isolation doesn’t provide any SEO benefit, this isn’t always true" Which ... isn't what we said. We said that if people are deleting content just because they think old content is somehow bad that's -- again -- not a thing. To me that reads like it is possible to improve the ranking of new content by deleting old content. The only thing they are refuting is that the age of the deleted content is the reason for the improvement.
- bagacrap 3y agoWhich is a pretty crucial distinction, no? No one would get upset if CNET announced they were deleting clickbait and blogspam. With articles such as "The Best Home Deals from Urban Outsitters' Fall Forward Sale" currently gracing their front page, I'm wondering how long HN commenters expect to need access to this content.
- Espionage724 3y agoI 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 purging aren't worthwhile. If I write up an article about a cat playing on a scratching post, there's a good chance there's nothing unique or valuable about it and it doesn't need to sit around gathering bit rot :p
- sydbarrett74 3y agoFrom 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.'
- LordShredda 3y agoOffloading trash to an already strained organisation. are they donating any help or is it just taking advantage of charity?
- Espionage724 3y agoLmao 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.
- em-bee 3y agoyes, this greatly legitimizes the wayback archive.
- renewiltord 3y agoI didn't know they were strained. Probably best to block them so they don't spend resources on unimportant things. You can find a few UA strings here https://udger.com/resources/ua-list/bot-detail?bot=archive.org_bot https://udger.com/resources/ua-list/bot-detail?bot=archive.o... Ultimately, it looks like they do respect the `archive.org_bot` string so if you want to help the strained organization, probably best to block it as well. You can also save them some space, it appears, by uploading a file on your website asking them not to retain it and then sending an email to them. See https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/128352 https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/128352 For now, I just blocked the bot, but when I have some time maybe I'll ask them to delete the data. Hopefully, with a little community effort we can reduce the strain on them so they can spend their limited resources reasonably.
- petee 3y agoI'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.
- laweijfmvo 3y agoYup, "Last Updated on xxx" but no obvious updates called out in the article
- 1letterunixname 3y agoAnd definitely no "diff" to previous versions. Even if updates are mostly minor corrections or batch updates of boilerplate, the capability exists to rewrite any part or all of a story if there's no way to see past versions from third-parties from a single cache from archive.is or possibly archive.org. Archival navigation and visualization should be deeply integrated into a user-centric, privacy browser.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwitawayfam 3y agoReddit does this and it's very frustrating
- mnholt 3y agoWow, I thought that was just me. The elation of googling for a niche Reddit topic and finding one very recent only to reach that sad realization that the content is 11y old and likely not relevant anymore.
- tiltowait 3y agoEven worse when this happens, and you find that it's an old post you made. Happened to me more than once. I never realized this was intentional on reddit's part; I just assumed Google was broken.
- crazygringo 3y agoIs 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 actually isn't, it baffles me why CNET thinks it would be.
- SoftTalker 3y agoPerhaps sites with a small ratio of new:total content would be downranked --- but I really don't think that makes sense because that's going to be the case for any long-established site.
- laweijfmvo 3y agoI have noticed some articles (and not just "Best XXX of 202Y" articles) that seem to always update their "Updated on" date which Google unhelpfully picks up and shows in search results leading me to think the page is much more recent than it is.
- burnhamup 3y agoThe 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 maybe mark some pages with a no index header. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/large-site-managing-crawl-budget https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- loandbehold 3y agoThat'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.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoHeck, sometimes that answer is even correct!
- 6510 3y agoThink of it like floating point logic.
- guy98238710 3y agoI have been recently forking off a subproject from Git repo. After spending a lot of time messing around with it and getting into a lot of unforeseen trouble, I finally asked ChatGPT how to do it and of course ChatGPT knew the correct answer all along. I felt like an idiot. Now I always ask ChatGPT first. These LLMs are way smarter than you would think. GPT4 with WolframAlpha plugin even gave me enough information to implement Taylor polynomial approximation for Gaussian function (don't ask why I needed that), which would have otherwise taken me hours of studying if I could even solve it at all. PS: GPT4 somehow knows even things that are really hard to find online. I recently needed standard error but not of mean but rather of standard deviation. GPT4 not only understood my vague query but gave me formula that is really hard to find online even if you already know the keywords. I know it's hard to find, because I went ahead to double-check ChatGPT's answer via search.
- em-bee 3y agoi use a tool for programming that's based on ChatGPT i find it most helpful when i am not sure how to phrase a query so that direct search would find something. but i also found that in at least half the cases the answer is incomplete or even wrong. the last one i remember explained in the text what functions or settings i could use in the text, but the code example that it presented did not do what the text suggested. it really drove home the point that these are just haphazardly assembled responses that sometimes get things right by pure chance. with questions like yours i would be very careful to verify that the solution is actually correct.
- _jal 3y agoThey'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.
- JohnFen 3y agoOr just skip CNET entirely. They haven't been worthwhile for a very long time.
- imchillyb 3y agoAlternate title: "How the internet ate itself." This seems antithetical to the internet approach of 'data wants to be free.' Data most assuredly doesn't want to die. Why U kill data?
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoOne of my favourite websites growing up: download.com
- brink 3y agoSame. I was a kid in the country, so we didn't have internet. I used to ride my bike with my thumb drive to the library's computers to see what was new on download.com at least once a week. It was like visiting a candy store. It's a shame those days are over.
- demizer 3y agoWhen download.com became infested with ad ware was a sad day. I used to visit that site a lot to see what cool software I could install. Thank the heavens for Linux for teaching me proper package management.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- orangepurple 3y agoIf you're on Windows you can try Scoop https://scoop.sh/#/apps https://scoop.sh/#/apps
- xdennis 3y agoI just went to http://download.com http://download.com . On the frontpage they have demos for NFS Underground 2, Vice City and Age of Empires II. It's like I've entered a time warp. So many memories!
- p1mrx 3y agosoftseek.com was better, because everything had a screenshot. I would actually prefer this interface over modern app stores: https://web.archive.org/web/19991013034959/http://softseek.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19991013034959/http://softseek.c...
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
- 1970-01-01 3y ago“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
- jzb 3y agoThis 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.
- kenjackson 3y agoIn 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?
- slater 3y agoOr mayhap Google et al could realize and understand that having old articles in archive shouldn't penalize your ranking.
- modeless 3y agoWho says this is actually improving their ranking? SEO is smoke and mirrors. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole exercise was actually counterproductive for them, and they just don't realize it.
- codedokode 3y agoNot always smoke. If you have enough resources, you can make research and test hypothesis. Also, sometimes there are leaks, like a leak of Yandex source code, which disclosed what factors were used for ranking.
- Izkata 3y agoYeah, didn't old google's PageRank penalize broken links?
- choppaface 3y agoNope nope too busy on Bard and making cookies more favorable to Adsense https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-third-party-cookies/ https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-third-party-cookies/ And if the content isn't shared somewhere (typically on a non-Google property), then is it even relevant anymore? All the Googlers who defined search relevance outside of freshness have left to other opportunities.
- ghaff 3y agoWhile 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).
- flangola7 3y agoWhat reasons would there to be to delete old new articles? My inner historian is screaming.
- ghaff 3y agoCompanies 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.
- flangola7 3y agoOk Captain Obvious. That isn't useful OR new information.
- skissane 3y agoOne reason is if you keep all your old versions of product docs up, Google will randomly send people to the old version instead of the current one, and then customers will get confused by the outdated info 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
- em-bee 3y agobut if i have an old version of the product, then i may need those old docs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- glenngillen 3y agoIt'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.
- lucumo 3y agoIf your tool for finding pages incentivizes people to destroy some pages so others can be found, then something went horribly wrong.
- myshpa 3y agoLet Google die already.
- pessimizer 3y agoSo 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?
- demizer 3y agoGoogle is destroying the internet is a good way to put it. AD dollars are their only priority. I hope Google dies because of it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zx8080 3y agoWhat a fantasy. It does not show any sign of profit decrease. How would a company die with $279.8B revenue, steadily increasing yearly?
- mxkopy 3y agoI suspect that the revenue increases have more to do with the addition of new users in developing markets rather than actual value added. Once all potential users have been reached, Google will have to actually improve their product.
- dereg 3y agoNo such suspicion is necessary. Google's revenue from the United States has only increased as a share of its total revenue over the past decade. https://abc.xyz/assets/4c/c7/d619b323f5bba689be986d716a61/34ac6dab5f586b2e6e008b99fe683e35.html https://abc.xyz/assets/4c/c7/d619b323f5bba689be986d716a61/34...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- robertkeizer 3y agoThis is why I work at archive.org. Is it perfect? No. Does it have value to society? Absolutely.
- npunt 3y agoI adore archive.org. I'm worried though it is becoming somewhat of a load bearing element of civilization, given the importance of shared and accurate history. We need redundancy. ~~I'm also worried about the deletion of old pages on archive because new owners of a domain update the robots.txt file to disallow it, which I've heard wipes the entire archive.org history of that domain. I hope that gets addressed.~~ Edit: this is no longer the case
- amatecha 3y agoYeah wait, what? I hope that's incorrect. Updating robots.txt to disallow should only omit content from that point onward... It shouldn't be retroactive. What if there's a new owner of a respective domain, for example?
- rany_ 3y agoIt isn't, I really wish that instead of wiping DECADES of history; it only applies to content that was archived from the day of the domain's registration. I think this is slightly more reasonable, but I imagine they simply don't have access to such data.
- pseudalopex 3y agoSimply requiring domain owners contact archive.org to remove old snapshots would be better than applying robots.txt retroactively.
- pseudalopex 3y agoIt was correct. And archive.org used this self inflicted problem to justify disregarding robots.txt. https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
- codedokode 3y agoGoogle also might be at fault for making images on web lower quality. Several years ago, Google had announced that page load speed will affect the ranking. Google's tool, PageSpeed Insights gave recommendations on improving load speed. But it also recommended to lower quality of JPEG images to the level where artifacts would be visible. So instead of proper manual testing (using eyes, not a mathematical formula) on a large set of images, some Google employee simply wrote a recommended compression level out of their head and this forced web masters to worsen the quality of the images below any acceptable level. So it doesn't matter if the photographer or illustrator worked hard to make a beautiful image, Google's robotic decision based on some lifeless mathematical formula crossed out their efforts.
- CamperBob2 3y agoThat also explains why 2000s-era postage-stamp size photos are now back in vogue. When it comes to Google, sufficiently-advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.
- martinald 3y agoYes, this is made much worse by Google's "smartphone" crawler on pagespeed insights being an emulated very low end Moto G phone (10 years old?), downclocked to 25% of original (very slow) CPU speed, with a network that maxes out at 1mbit/sec or so, with 150ms latency added. Makes it incredibly difficult to have nice imagery above the fold at least.
- anthk 3y agoHalf of the web it's just to reference itself on ads.
- dillydogg 3y agoDoes anyone have a self hostable archiving/bookmark manager to recommend? I have been using Wallabag but I find it just okay
- rdiddly 3y agoThis is like the flea on the dog's tail, wagging the tail and dog. I don't know how many more levels of meta we can handle. Also, if you just dump all that content on archive.org, you're kind of just reaching into archive.org's wallet, pulling out dollar bills, and giving them to Google, whose ostensible goal was to index and make available all the world's information. I feel like that's enough irony and internet for today.
- poorman 3y agoThis smells like one content company throwing shade at another content company.
- userbinator 3y agoNewer is not always better, especially when you're looking for information on old things, but I suspect there are vested interests who don't want us to remember how much better things were in the past, so they can continue to espouse their illusion of "progress", and this "cleaning up" of old information is contributing to that goal. Archive.org deserves all the support it needs. If only the Wayback Machine was actually indexed and searchable too...
- flenserboy 3y agoThanks, Google, for making the 'net even more useless! & ahistoric!
- scrame 3y agocnet got bought by vulture capital a couple years back and already had been replacing writers with crap AI before chatGPT was a thing. this shouldn't be a surprise. everything CNET related has been a walking corpse for a while now.
- BonoboIO 3y agoI remember that CNET was a credible source 10 years ago, now it’s like a tabloid that reports 1 week old stories with clickbait titles and thin content.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoThe gamification of ranking and clickbait by encouraging digital amnesia and bitrot seems both absurd and evil. New content isn't always good or better when specific content was desired. 0. Donate to internet archive now 1. Website operators should aim to not hide content or download artifacts behind JS with embedded absolute URIs or authenticated APIs.
- dbg31415 3y agoSmart to delete old content. Very few people use it. And it costs resources to keep up and crawl. Better to prune content that doesn’t get a lot of traffic to keep your domain authority high. Also 50k page limit on sitemap.xml. Also… stop hoarding. Delete everything you can. As often as you can. Clinging to the past isn’t healthy.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoSince everyone's reacting to the headline and hasn't read The Fine Article... Please let me call attention to the linked tweet from Google explicitly saying don't do this. > Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing! Our guidance doesn't encourage this. Older content can still be helpful, too. https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800
- schappim 3y agoMaking helpful content requires time and money. Slashing staff and using AI generated content [1] is not the way to do this. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cnet-slashes-10-staff-says-cuts-unrelated-ai-generated-content-2023-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/cnet-slashes-10-staff-says-c...
- mrd3v0 3y agoAnd? I really do not get how a tweet from Google contradicts the fact that their search engine is hot garbage that incentivises spam, centralised silos and "SEO tricks" like what CNET is doing.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoI don't have any agenda, it just seems like important context. c|net is doing something stupid and apparently it isn't even going to accomplish their goal. Maybe this statement from Google will help convince other companies not to do the same thing. FWIW, I'm as mad about Google quality going downhill as anyone's. The problem of sites doing stupid things for SEO purposes goes back at least 20 years though.
- mrd3v0 3y agoSEO is not reliant, and is often contradictory to statements like the one you quoted. No one who takes SEO seriously looks at what Google says. They look at how Google behaves. Source: used to professionally offer SEO services.
- arvidkahl 3y agoSEO optimization is actively destroying the archives of blogs out there. Pruning articles to rank better is rewarded. Removing knowledge to "play the game" is a viable path to making money. The saving grace here? The existence of the Wayback Machine. A non-profit by the Internet Archive that is severely underfunded. If you ever needed a reason to donate, this is probably it. And even then, the survival of this information depends on a singular platform. Digital historians of the future will have a tough job.
- Animats 3y agoIf you use a robots.txt file to put your site's archives off limits to Google, does Google obey that? Your own search box can still search them.
- pteraspidomorph 3y agoThey would probably have thought of that if they had anyone left who knew anything about the internet...
- pyuser583 3y agoThis is a great example of the harms of AI. Google presumably used AI to rank pages (it hasn’t been just PageRank for a while). The AI has noticed people don’t engage with older content, so it deranks older content. It also deranks websites with lots of older content. So websites pull their older content , which is an important form of historical memory. Even if the AI isn’t actually doing this, people assume it is. Because AIs aren’t rules based, we have to guess what it’s doing. And we guess it’s deranking old sites.
- itisit 3y agoIt's been quite a while, but CNET has never been the same since CBS acquired them in 2008. They drove the site to become SEO fodder, almost like a ZergNet for tech. And their most recent acquirer is diluting whatever integrity remains by pushing out a slew of "lifestyle" content. It's a shame because CNET, surprisingly, has retained some really great editors that are as knowledgeable as they come in their respective domains. David Katzmaier and Brian Cooley come to mind.
- mdwalters 3y agoSo, CNET decides to delete lots of useful information, just for better SEO. None of the other old tech news websites are trying to destroy thier information for the SEO, they still get good rankings. This should be a good lesson to anyone else who are thinking of going this route.
- jzombie 3y agoCould CNET not have relocated these articles to a distinct directory and then used robots.txt to prevent search engines from indexing them? This move seems like an excuse to offload subpar content by placing the blame on external factors. It's sort of like saying, "we withdrew a significant amount of cash from the bank and torched it to make space for fresh funds."
- epakai 3y agoCNET did this a while back, but it didn't seem SEO related then. They used to have tons of old tech specs. I remember them being the last source of specs for an obscure managed switch. Then the whole of that data just went away with no notice. Really great resource lost.
- xnx 3y agoI believe that data might have been licensed (from Etilize?). They could have stopped paying for it and lost the rights to display it.
- gcanyon 3y agoMy first reaction was to think "Google is a shitty search engine if CNET can improve their search ranking by deleting information." But then I thought about scenarios where this might be legitimate. If we assume: 1. Google has some ability to assess the value of content that isn't 100% reliable at a per-article level, but in aggregate is accurate. 2. Google therefore has the ability to judge CNET's content quality score in aggregate, and use that in search rankings for individual articles. 3. CNET knows that they have articles that rate well on Google's quality score, and articles that rate poorly. 4. CNET has reason to think they can generally distinguish "good" articles from "bad" articles. THEN it would (could?) make sense to remove the "bad" articles in order to raise their aggregate quality score. It's kind of like the Laffer Curve of Google Content Quality. Overall traffic could go up if the "bad" articles are "bad" enough. That said, unless CNET was publishing absolutely useless garbage at some point, it would make a lot more sense to just de-index those articles, or even for Google to provide a way for a site to mark lower-quality articles, so Google understands that the overall quality score shouldn't be harmed by that article about the Top 5 Animals As Ranked By Hitler, but if someone actually Googles that, it's fine for CNET to have retained that article, and for Google to send them to it. In short: Google advising sites not to do this when there are perfectly reasonable alternatives seems silly.
- xnx 3y agoThis superstitious "prune old content" bs is commonly repeated by seo know nothing's.
- sinuhe69 3y agoThat’s the reason why we’ve to archive articles we found valuable. Things are not in the net forever :’(
- wly_cdgr 3y agoSeems fine. Better delete bad content than destroy mid content by drowning it in an ocean of crap.
- blarfingar 3y agoWhen did CNET become so thirsty?
- 12907835202 3y agoWouldn't it be better to move them to a new domain? Worst case scenario they're kept forever. Best case that new domain starts ranking well.
- gmerc 3y agoIs it tho - or is it to ‘save the content from AI’
- whirlwin 3y agoWhy not make a GPT implementation rephrase every article once a week or so. Then it appears new from a SEO perspective
- pyeri 3y agoSome things about the 1990s Internet will soon be found nowhere except in some people's memories. Big Tech is trying very hard to ensure that.
- tablet 3y agoSEO is so fucked...
- septillianator 3y agonow if someone would go through and remove all the outdated tech support/ trouble shooting
- Roark66 3y agoSo, let me get this right. CNET started using "generative AI" to write their articles. Google no doubt detected it and down ranked them to hell. CNET stopped the AI generation and they decided to delete their archives to improve their rankings?
- vbezhenar 3y agoHopefully they'll get artificial penalty for gaming the system.
- polygot 3y agoIs the fact that CNET deleting old articles improving its Google Search ranking? I'd say so, it's all over the news now.
- xnavra50 3y agoThat's not a behaviour we would like to encourage, right?
- pritambarhate 3y agoThere can be many reasons for this from SEO point of view. One of them can be to send Link Juice to the pages they want to rank better (May be because those pages bring more advertising revenue or being new don't have enough backlinks.) So let's say you have old pages which have good amount of backlinks but the stale content is not bringing enough visitors to your site. So you can delete those pages and permanently redirect them to new pages. This way the new page will get a Link Juice boost and it will perform better in search results.
- PaulWaldman 3y agoWhy not at least spin the old articles into a sub-brand? Something like CNET archive?
- DeathArrow 3y agoI begin to think that Google is a disease for the Internet.
- gmd63 3y agoIT : dementia :: finance : cancer
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hooby 3y agoSomething is going very wrong here. Information on the internet should be in whatever format best suits the topic. The format that best serves the users looking for that information. And search engines should learn to interpret that information and the various formats, in order to be able to best connect those searching information with those providing information. Yes, the search engine should adapt to the information and it's formats - not the other way round. Instead we see "information" (or the AI-generated trite replacing it) adapt it's contents and format for search engines, in a bid to ultimately best serve advertisers. And search engines too adapt and change their algorithms to best serve advertisers. As a result it becomes ever harder and harder for users to actually find the information they want in a format that works. It's become so bad, that it's now more practicable to use advanced AI to filter out the actual information and re-format it, rather than go look for for it yourself. As a human, you no longer want to use the web, and search... you want to have a bot that does that for you... because ultimately the space has become pretty hostile to humans.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 3y agoWhy do the articles have to be deleted? Is robots.txt or <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> not sufficient? Deleting articles will break so many external links.
- zx10rse 3y agoHighly doubt that this is for SEO purposes, serp does not work like that. Smell like a bad management decision, and probably some huge investment in an ai tool that needs to be justified monetarily. They will probably nuke a huge portion of their traffic, and loose a ton of backlinks. If you genuinely strive to create a great content that piece of content will drive traffic, leads, sales, help for rankings and etc. for years. Just by searching a random thing like "how to build an engine" the first article that comes, and the top results is from 1997.
- Hard_Space 3y agoI have noticed this at some of the sites I used to write for. Hence, as soon as I put a new piece up, I archive it at archive.is, and include that reference in my site's list of my work. Periodically, I should go there and check each one, but there's a lot of material. I did not know that this was a possible motivation as to why my more 'historic' work is disappearing, though.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoWhat’s the difference between archive.is and Internet Archive Wayback Machine?
- Hard_Space 3y agoIt handles some of the more complex formatting better, and succeeds better in simplifying complex CSS and templates. Also better latency, usually.
- ghaff 3y agoSites also just reorganize, change CMSs, simply go out of business (which can happen to archive.is as well). I save a lot of my own stuff but it's a bit hit or miss and I expect a lot of the material we lean on The Wayback Machine to save is probably pretty hard to actually discover.
- Hard_Space 3y agoTrue about archive.is being probably more at risk than WayBack Machine. I just don't know when I'll ever get the 2-3 days necessary to additionally back the posts up at WM, because each save is very slow.
- nologic01 3y agoImagine, 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 find stuff. Search providers, continues the sci-fi imagination, keep innovating and differentiating themselves to keep an edge over competition and please their users. Producers of content, one the other hand, cannot assume much about what the inventive and aggressively competitive group of search providers will accentuate to please their users. So they focus on... improving the quality of their content, which is what they do best anyway. Its a win-win for users and content producers. Alas, search service providers have to actually work for their money. This is slightly discomforting to a few, but not the end of the world. One cannot but admire the imagination of such authors. What bizarre universes they keep inventing.
- Aerbil313 3y agoSearch 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.
- nologic01 3y agoThere are more assumptions than words in this sentence.
- knallfrosch 3y agoYet reality seems eerily similar
- zirgs 3y agoDepends 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.
- 3y ago
- ajyotirmay 3y agoCan't believe how many morons are at the helm and making decisions. This simple exercise should tell us how much trustworthy CNET is with their technical knowledge LOL
- mikro2nd 3y agoDoes anybody actually browse CNET on purpose? I mean, the content has been the quality of LLM-generated for a decade or more and the only way any sane person ends up seeing it is if you get redirected through a link-shortener/link-obfuscator, surely. Surely?
- llarsson 3y agoThe fact that they resorted to writing crap these days with AI is what is making them lose relevance, not that they have been in the business for a long time, and have thousands upon thousands of articles. CNET used to, perhaps not be cool, but it certainly was a place you'd go get tech news from every once in a while. Just imagine they were huge enough to buy download.com, back then, even! For a while, they were essentially *the* place you'd go for downloads of various shareware stuff. Now, it's a ghost town of a site with AI-written junk.
- Moldoteck 3y agoI don't get it, why they just don't update the entries to disallow googlebot parsing those links, this way it'll be removed for google but accessible for others
- zirgs 3y agoSo much for - "Internet doesn't forget". It does. A lot of stuff has been lost.
- bonoboTP 3y agoThey 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.
- zirgs 3y agoThe 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.
- bonoboTP 3y agoMaybe. 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.
- chaos986 3y agoSEO 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.
- Ensorceled 3y agoThe 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.
- jwie 3y agoSEO 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.
- Tenoke 3y agoTo a large extent yes, but I'd wager a lot of sites have been improved by people reading about ranking and SEO as a lot of it is just better incentives for good/bad behavior (e.g. punishing copy pasting, rewarding relevant keyword usage).
- moneywoes 3y agoWhy wouldn’t this just lower their domain authority
- aphrax 3y agoI feel like the internet is a bust at this point - I find it all quite depressing - which is kind of silly I know.
- boiler_up800 3y agoThey’re simply wrong in their theory of the case here. My guess is they will look back on this experiment in a year and regret it. Having older, highly linked content on a site is every SEO’s dream.
- causi 3y agoTerrible shame. CNET reviews were like going shopping in a technology wonderland when I was a kid. I wonder if they're going to erase James Kim's body of work as well. That would be a shame.
- generalvicinity 3y agoIn all seriousness, I thought cNet
- topherPedersen 3y agoLuckily it's just one website making a dumb decision to delete their content. I doubt that this will actually boost their rankings, and I hope others don't follow CNET's lead. (Hopefully CNET is wrong, and that deleting your sites old content doesn't actually help your search engine ranking on Google.)
- markstos 3y agoAfter I weeded my 20 year garden of personal content , I can confirm the blog was more relevant and a better user experience. Not all content should be immortal.
- gniv 3y agoThis seems like a win-win for CNET. They get publicity from the news and lots of typical outrage and Google-bashing comments. And if it doesn't improve the ranking as expected, they can always put back the old articles, quietly.
- nextmove 3y agoCan we all please start building decentralized tools now. Stop giving these crap companies power over you and your data. You don't know what they'll do with your data in the future (think George Orwell). As we can see these companies can out of the blue force other companies to delete their old articles. There goes freedom of speech just to rank higher on a shi*y search engine that no one smart even uses (I use brave search). Then again, these companies kowtowing to Googl mainly write for the brainwashed sheep. I personally don't use any of their privacy invasive analytics on my blog.
- roody15 3y agoGoogle search is terrible these days. I find myself using other engines even yandex to find things these days. It has been in a decline now for at least the last 3-5 years. All this SEO garbage may be responsible but I still think google could do a much better job. Feels like Google is just over monetizing it’s search at this point and the quality of product is in a free fall.
- aaarrm 3y agoI saw someone mention kagi, a premium search engine, on here recently and I've been loving it. Hadn't heard of yandex, I'll give that one a try too. Google definitely has an incentive to push content farms covered in Google ads to the top of its search engine, whereas a premium service's only incentive is to provide the best search engine possible.
- chemmail 3y agoThere are so many websites nowadays that should delete themselves altogether.
- uni_baconcat 3y agoRecently, I did some research on the topics of "Windows Phone" and "Windows Mobile". I found a lot of interesting articles on Hacker News, thanks to everyone who contributed to the database. However, many of the links are no longer working. Some websites domain have expired, while others have chosen to remove the old articles. That made me feel so bad.
- rondrabkin 3y agoBefore we crucify these guys do we know what articles they are deleting? I’ve found deleting the worst quality ads to be good for everyone. Maybe they are deleting the worst.