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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
by jzb 3y ago
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.
- 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.
- DropInIn 3y agoYou'd think that having a long history of content with traffic to said content over that time would be a key differentiator in ranking pages.... The issue here is very clearly with how Google et al are operating, effectively intentionally favoring blog spam over real content producers.
- bippihippi1 3y agogoogle shows ads not good content. let's hope those are more aligned in the future
- jpk 3y agoYep. Also, the days of the "Advanced Search" page have passed, but Google still has time range options under the "Tools" button near the top of the results page. If they're giving the user the option to filter results by time, then it's pretty goofy for the algorithm to de-rank a site in results where the the default of "Any time" was selected in the query just because the site has old articles in the index.
- ajmurmann 3y agoI'm afraid that, as so often with any topic, the vast majority of users never or rarely uses the time filter and so everything gets optimized for the users to dumb to search properly.
- jpk 3y agoIn this case I'm not too keen on blaming users for this when the option is sorta buried in the current design. The Tools button isn't prominent, the current value of the time range option is completely hidden when it's on the default of "Any time", and the search query doesn't change if you alter the time range option. (And, to my knowledge, there's not a search query incantation for specifying the time range.) If the current UI is a reflection of what PMs at Google want users to do, then they don't really care if the user uses, or even knows about, the option to filter by time. So I don't think it flies to point at the user and say, "you're holding it wrong".
- codeflo 3y agoOr perhaps more likely: Giving users a more prominent way to filter by time didn’t improve ad clicks and was thus A/B tested out of the product. Just like it was A/B tested that the best background color to contrast the ad area against the organic results’ #ffffff is #fffffe.
- reaperducer 3y agoOr mayhap Google et al could realize and understand that having old articles in archive shouldn't penalize your ranking. I will not be surprised if in my lifetime it is not possible to Google anything by William Shakespeare.
- ta988 3y agomove the old articles to another domain or non indexed pages.
- kenjackson 3y agoThat's what the article says they're doing.
- ghaff 3y agoThe article isn't super-clear about what's happening and, for most purposes, just dumping stuff on the Wayback Machine is probably not that different from deleting it even if the bits are still "somewhere." A few years back I copied any of my CNET stuff I cared about to my own site and, in general, that's a strategy I've followed with a number of sites as I don't expect anything to continue to be hosted or at least be findable indefinitely.
- cout 3y agoI kinda wish there were some way to store every page I ever visit automatically and index it locally for easy search. Then when I want to look up e.g. the guy who had the popular liquid oxygen fire website back in the 90s it would be easy. But I also fear it would be used against me somehow too.
- ghaff 3y agoYou can pay for pinboard.in and it does something along the lines of what you're looking for.
- dylan604 3y agoThe things people can do with your browser history of just URLs makes me happy that the actual content on said pages are NOT stored locally. Otherwise, there is the save page option in your browser if you do want to keep a local copy.
- ratg13 3y ago
- 1123581321 3y agoI'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.
- frozenport 3y agoMake a second archive website
- Xelbair 3y agosimple. Split google's Ad part, with search part and chrome part. Because it's clearly bullshit at this point.
- rocqua 3y agoHow could search survive? The business value of search is in providing data for ads, is it not?
- whstl 3y agoI assume GP means to split Search but keep search ads, called "AdWords", together with it. The third-party advertisement part of Google was/is called AdSense. The two were always run separately AFAIK.
- sznio 3y agoBy running ads. Probably Google Ads. What it's already doing.
- rocqua 3y agoI thought that the ads on search were a nice to have, but that the real value of search was the profile it allows google to build about a person, which is then used by all ad systems used by google. Split that off, and search is all of a sudden producing a whole let less value, since the profiling value cannot be meaningfully extracted by other companies.
- samtp 3y agoMove the articles to archived.cnet.com or cnetarchive.com instead of just deleting them
- chronogram 3y agoThey can just set a noindex tag in the HTML head or send it in the http response header for older pages, then links still work.
- kawsper 3y agoIt's my understanding that doing what you propose will still use up the crawl budget, because the bot will have to download the page and parse it to understand that it is no-indexed.
- tempestn 3y agoThen you could also block those pages in robots.txt, no? (You do need to do both though, as otherwise pages can be indexed based on links, without being crawled.)
- collinmanderson 3y agoExactly. This should be solvable without actually deleting the pages. I assume they're only removing articles with near-zero backlinks, so a noindex,nofollow should generally be fine, but if crawl budget is an issue robots.txt and sitemap can help.
- tempestn 3y agoThe real answer is that there's a non-zero cost to maintain these pages, and even more so if robots.txt entries and such have to be maintained for them as well. And if they have no monetary benefit, or even potentially a detriment, it makes more sense for them from a business perspective to just get rid of them. Unfortunately.
- chimprich 3y ago> 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.
- Ensorceled 3y agoBecause 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?
- barbariangrunge 3y agoThe real reason: hiding it from ai scrapers?
- dylan604 3y agosomething about bathwater and babies comes to mind
- cratermoon 3y agoUnderrated comment. This has to be part of it.
- dbbk 3y agoIf it were truly just about Google rankings they would noindex the pages
- jzb 3y agoIt’s on archive.org, is that really going to work?
- chaostheory 3y agoIs this why Google search is really terrible now? The search results are nearly unusable today compared to 1-2 years ago
- midasuni 3y agoPeople have said that for years.
- chaostheory 3y agoIs this related to privacy? I know I have my web activity set to delete after 18 months. Is it too small?
- hindsightbias 3y agoThe only History that exists today is that which doesn’t end with a 404. We might as well burn the libraries, they serve no modern purpose.
- MrVandemar 3y agoLibrians regularly cull books. Magazines are cleared off the newstands weekly or monthly. Storing and indexing and maintaining old content isn't free, in either dollars or environmental footprint.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago>Storing and indexing and maintaining old content isn't free, in either dollars or environmental footprint. It's pretty close to free.
- gretch 3y agoWhy don't you go ahead and personally do it then? It's pretty close to free.
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoIt's pretty close to free because they already pay for the infrastructure for the current content. The marginal cost is very low.
- zirgs 3y agoYou can store the whole wikipedia on a single SD card these days. Storage space is not a problem.
- andirk 3y agoA really awesome on-the-ground website for information about specifics in collectibles was allexperts.com (now defunct). They got bought by something about.com who then got bought by a Thought Company? and they straight up deleted all of the 10+ years of people asking common questions about collectibles and getting solid answers. Poof.
- idonotknowwhy 3y agoThe crtgaming community hate that a few years ago, they deleted all the specs for old CRT monitors :(