13 ms·

I'll just assume you neglected to read TFA, because if you had, you would have discovered that it links to an official Google source that states CNET shouldn't

I'll just assume you neglected to read TFA, because if you had, you would have discovered that it links to an official Google source that states CNET shouldn't be doing this.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800

Brian_K_White 3y ago
[flagged]
kccqzy 3y ago
This is another problem of the entire SEO industry. Websites trust these SEO consultants and growth hackers more than they trust information from Google itself. Somehow, it becomes widely accepted that the best information on Google ranking is from those third parties but not Google.
- 88913527 3y ago
  It could be premature to place fault with the SEO industry. Think about the incentives: Google puts articles out, but an SEO specialist might have empirical knowledge from working for a various number of web properties. It's not that I wouldn't trust Google's articles, but specialists might have discovered undocumented methods for giving a boost.
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    They certainly want you to believe that.
    - linkjuice4all 3y ago
      The good ones will share the data/trends/case studies that would support the effectiveness of their methods. But the vast majority are morons, grifters, and cargo culters. The Google guidance is generally good and mildly informative but there’s a lot of depth that typically isn’t covered that the SEO industry basically has to black box test to find out.
- whyenot 3y ago
  I'm not sure it is so cut and dried. Who is more likely to give you accurate information on how to game Google's ranking: Google themselves, or an SEO firm. I suspect that Google has far less incentive to provide good information on this than an SEO firm would.
  - devoutsalsa 3y ago
    Google will give you advice on how to not be penalized by Google. They won’t give you advice on how to game the system in your favor. The more Google helps you get ahead, the more you end up dominating the search results. The more you dominate the results, the more people will start thinking to come straight to you. The more people come straight to you, the more people never use Google. The less people use Google, the less revenue Google generates.
    - water-your-self 3y ago
      Search heremetically provides a very small amount of profits. Google makes most of its money on the websites it surfaces via ads.
    - pmontra 3y ago
      > The more you dominate the results, the more people will start thinking to come straight to you. This is a possible outcome but there are people that type in google.com and then the name of their preferred news site, their bank, etc, every day. The site with the name they search dominates that search but they keep searching it.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        I would like to know what dollar amount Google makes on people typing things like “Amazon” into google search and then clicking the first paid result to Amazon.
  - iamflimflam1 3y ago
    It’s the same on YouTube - the majority of the people who work there seem to have no idea how “the algorithm” actually works - yet they still produce all sorts of “advice” on how to make better videos.
- austinpena 3y ago
  Of course SEO consultants are trusted more than Google. They often ignore what Google says and bring good results for their clients. Google has a vested interest in creating a good web experience. Consultants have an interest in making their clients money. Link building is a classic example where good consultants deliver value. (There are bad consultants than good ones though)
- julianeon 3y ago
  There’s an easy proof that those SEO consultants have a point: find a site that according to Google’s criteria will never rank, which has rocketed to the top of the search rankings in its niche within a couple months. That’s a regular thing and proves that there are ways to rank on Google that Google won’t advise.
- ohgodplsno 3y ago
  Google actively lies on an infinite number of subjects. And SEO is a completely adversarial subject where Google has an interest in lying to prevent some behaviors. While consultants and "growth hackers" are very often selling snake oil, that doesn't make Google an entity you can trust either.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  > Websites trust these SEO consultants and growth hackers more than they trust information from Google itself. That's because websites' goals and Google's goals are not aligned. Websites want people to engage with their website, view ads, buy products, or do something else (e.g. buy a product, vote for a party). If old content does not or detracts from those goals, they and SEO experts say, it should go because it's dragging the rest down. Google wants all the information and for people to watch their ads. Google likes the long tail; Google doesn't care if articles from the 90's are outdated because people looking at it (assuming the page runs Google ads) or searching for it (assuming they use Google) means impressions and therefore money for them. Google favors quantity over quality, websites the other way around. To oversimplify and probably be incorrect.
svachalek 3y ago
If Google says one thing and rewards a different thing, guess which one will happen.
farnarkle 3y ago
That only says that Google discourages such actions, not that such actions are not beneficial to SEO ranking (which is equal to the aforementioned economic incentive in this case).
- bagacrap 3y ago
  So whose word do we have to go on that this is beneficial, besides anonymous "SEO experts" and CNET leadership (those paragons of journalistic savvy)? Perhaps what CNET really means is that they're deleting old low quality content with high bounce rates. After all, the best SEO is actually having the thing users want.
  - agrajag 3y ago
    Google actually describes an entirely plausible mechanism of action here at [1]. old content slows down site crawling, which can cause new content to not be refreshed as often. Sure, one page doesn’t matter, but thousands will. [1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129?s=20 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129...
    - magicalist 3y ago
      It says it doesn't affect ranking and their quote tweet is even more explicit https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689297947740295168 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689297947740295168
      - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
        This is the actual quote from Google PR: >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. Parsing this carefully, to me it sounds worded to give the impression removing old pages won’t help the ranking of other pages without explicitly saying so. In other words, if it turns out that deleting old pages helps your ranking (indirectly, by making Google crawl your new pages faster), this tweet is truthful on a technicality. In the context of negative attention where some of the blame for old content being removed is directed toward Google, there is a clear motive for a PR strategy that deflects in this way.
technion 3y ago
There's an awful lot of SEO people on Twitter that claim to be connected to Google, and the article he links on the Google domain as a reference doesn't say anything on the topic that I can find. I'm reluctant to call that an official source.
- bagacrap 3y ago
  He claims to work for Google on X, LinkedIn, and his own website. I am inclined to believe him because I think he would have received a cease and desist by now otherwise.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Probably not; anyone can claim to work for these companies with no repercussions, because is it a crime? Maybe if they're pricks that lower these companies' public opinion (libel), but even that requires a civil suit. But lying on the internet isn't a crime. I work for Google on quantum AI solutions in adtech btw.
    - mpixel 3y ago
      with a gold badge, half a million followers, as well as a wikipedia page that mentions he works at google?
    - shortformblog 3y ago
      He’s been lying a long time, considering that he’s kept the lie up that he’s an expert on SEO for nearly 30 years at this point, and I’ve been following his work most of that time.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    He claims to work for google as search "liason". He's a PR guy. His job is to make people think that google's search system is designed to improve the internet, instead of it being designed to improve google's accounting.
    - 3y ago
tlogan 3y ago
Google says so many things about SEO which are not true. There are some rules which are 100% true and some which they just hope their AI thinks they are true.
tyingq 3y ago
They say "Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!" But who knows, really? They run things to extract features nobody outside of Google knows that are proxies for "content quality". Then run them through pipelines of lots of different not-really-coordinated ML algorithms. Maybe some of those features aren't great for older pages? (broken links, out-of-spec html/js, missing images, references to things that don't exist, practices once allowed now discouraged...like <meta keywords>, etc). And I wouldn't be surprised if some part of overall site "reputation" in their eyes is some ratio of bad:good pages, or something along those lines. I have my doubts that Google knows exactly what their search engines likes and doesn't like. They surely know which ads to put next to those maybe flawed results, though.
somedude895 3y ago
I could imagine CNET‘s SEO team got an average rank goal instead of absolute SEO traffic. So by removing low ranked old pages the avg position of their search results goes closer to the top even though total traffic sinks. I‘ve seen stuff like this happen at my own company as well, where a team‘s KPIs are designed such that they‘ll ruin absolute numbers in order to achieve their relative KPI goals, like getting an increase in conversion rates by just cutting all low-conversion traffic.
- RheingoldRiver 3y ago
  This is why KPIs or targets should NEVER be calculated values like averages or ratios. The team is then incentivized to do something hostile such as not promote the content as much so that the ratio is higher, as soon as they barely scrape past the impressions mark.
  - cedilla 3y ago
    When deciding KPIs, Goodhart's law should always be kept in mind: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It's really hard to not create perverse incentives with KPIs. Targets like "% of tickets closed within 72 hours" can wreck service quality if the team is under enough pressure or unscrupulous.
  - iamacyborg 3y ago
    I mean, ideally you just have both an absolute and a calculated value to ensure both trend in the right direction.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Sure they can, e.g. on-time delivery (or even better shipments missing the promised delivery date) is a ratio. Or inventory turn rates, there you actually want people to attack the denominator. Generaly speaking, an easy solution is to attach another target to either the nominator or denominator, a target that requires people to move that in value in acertqin direction. That might even be a different team thanthe one having goals on the ratio.
tzfld 3y ago
I remember these kind of sources right from inside in the Matt Cutts era 15+ years ago encouraging and advising so many things which later proven to not be the case. I wouldn't take this only because it was written by the official guide.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mediascreen 3y ago
I few tweets down they qualify this, saying that it might improve some things like indexing of the rest of the site: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129 My understanding is that if you have a very large site, removing pages can sometimes help because: - There is an indexing "budget" for your site. Removing pages might make reindexing of the rest of the pages faster. - Removing pages that are cannibalising on each other might help the main page for the keywords to rank higher. - Google is not very fond of "thin wide" content. Removing low quality pages can be helpful, especially if you don't have a lot of links to your site. - Trimming the content of a website could make it easier for people and Google to understand what the site is about and help them find what they are looking for.
londons_explore 3y ago
Google search ranking involves lots of neural networks nowadays. There is no way the PR team making that tweet can say for sure that deleting old content doesn't improve rank. Nobody can say that for sure. The neural net is a black box, and it's behaviour is hard to predict without just trying it and seeing.
gmerc 3y ago
I don’t know man, I read it but I’ve learned to judge big tech talk purely by their actions and I don’t think there’s a lot of incentive built into their system that supports this statement.
catboybotnet 3y ago
Hey, don't do that. That's bad. But if you keep doing it, you'll get better SEO. No, we won't do anything to prevent this from being a way to game SEO. Words without action are useless.
josefresco 3y ago
Speaking from experience as someone who is paid for SEO optimization there's a list a mile long of things Google says "doesn't work" or you "shouldn't do" but in fact work very well and everyone is doing it.
laputan_machine 3y ago
Never has your username been so accurate as to who you are.
hbn 3y ago
RTFA does not include reading through every linked source.
Jiro 3y ago
"Google says you shouldn't do it" and "Google's search algorithm says that you should do it" can both be true at the same time. The official guidance telling you what to do doesn't track with what the search algorithm uses to decide search placement. Nobody's going to follow Google's written instructions if following the instructions results in a penalty and disobeying them results in a benefit.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

[flagged]

kccqzy 3y ago

This is another problem of the entire SEO industry. Websites trust these SEO consultants and growth hackers more than they trust information from Google itself. Somehow, it becomes widely accepted that the best information on Google ranking is from those third parties but not Google.

88913527 3y ago
It could be premature to place fault with the SEO industry. Think about the incentives: Google puts articles out, but an SEO specialist might have empirical knowledge from working for a various number of web properties. It's not that I wouldn't trust Google's articles, but specialists might have discovered undocumented methods for giving a boost.
- bagacrap 3y ago
  They certainly want you to believe that.
  - linkjuice4all 3y ago
    The good ones will share the data/trends/case studies that would support the effectiveness of their methods. But the vast majority are morons, grifters, and cargo culters. The Google guidance is generally good and mildly informative but there’s a lot of depth that typically isn’t covered that the SEO industry basically has to black box test to find out.
whyenot 3y ago
I'm not sure it is so cut and dried. Who is more likely to give you accurate information on how to game Google's ranking: Google themselves, or an SEO firm. I suspect that Google has far less incentive to provide good information on this than an SEO firm would.
- devoutsalsa 3y ago
  Google will give you advice on how to not be penalized by Google. They won’t give you advice on how to game the system in your favor. The more Google helps you get ahead, the more you end up dominating the search results. The more you dominate the results, the more people will start thinking to come straight to you. The more people come straight to you, the more people never use Google. The less people use Google, the less revenue Google generates.
  - water-your-self 3y ago
    Search heremetically provides a very small amount of profits. Google makes most of its money on the websites it surfaces via ads.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    > The more you dominate the results, the more people will start thinking to come straight to you. This is a possible outcome but there are people that type in google.com and then the name of their preferred news site, their bank, etc, every day. The site with the name they search dominates that search but they keep searching it.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      I would like to know what dollar amount Google makes on people typing things like “Amazon” into google search and then clicking the first paid result to Amazon.
- iamflimflam1 3y ago
  It’s the same on YouTube - the majority of the people who work there seem to have no idea how “the algorithm” actually works - yet they still produce all sorts of “advice” on how to make better videos.
austinpena 3y ago
Of course SEO consultants are trusted more than Google. They often ignore what Google says and bring good results for their clients. Google has a vested interest in creating a good web experience. Consultants have an interest in making their clients money. Link building is a classic example where good consultants deliver value. (There are bad consultants than good ones though)
julianeon 3y ago
There’s an easy proof that those SEO consultants have a point: find a site that according to Google’s criteria will never rank, which has rocketed to the top of the search rankings in its niche within a couple months. That’s a regular thing and proves that there are ways to rank on Google that Google won’t advise.
ohgodplsno 3y ago
Google actively lies on an infinite number of subjects. And SEO is a completely adversarial subject where Google has an interest in lying to prevent some behaviors. While consultants and "growth hackers" are very often selling snake oil, that doesn't make Google an entity you can trust either.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
> Websites trust these SEO consultants and growth hackers more than they trust information from Google itself. That's because websites' goals and Google's goals are not aligned. Websites want people to engage with their website, view ads, buy products, or do something else (e.g. buy a product, vote for a party). If old content does not or detracts from those goals, they and SEO experts say, it should go because it's dragging the rest down. Google wants all the information and for people to watch their ads. Google likes the long tail; Google doesn't care if articles from the 90's are outdated because people looking at it (assuming the page runs Google ads) or searching for it (assuming they use Google) means impressions and therefore money for them. Google favors quantity over quality, websites the other way around. To oversimplify and probably be incorrect.

svachalek 3y ago

If Google says one thing and rewards a different thing, guess which one will happen.

farnarkle 3y ago

That only says that Google discourages such actions, not that such actions are not beneficial to SEO ranking (which is equal to the aforementioned economic incentive in this case).

bagacrap 3y ago
So whose word do we have to go on that this is beneficial, besides anonymous "SEO experts" and CNET leadership (those paragons of journalistic savvy)? Perhaps what CNET really means is that they're deleting old low quality content with high bounce rates. After all, the best SEO is actually having the thing users want.
- agrajag 3y ago
  Google actually describes an entirely plausible mechanism of action here at [1]. old content slows down site crawling, which can cause new content to not be refreshed as often. Sure, one page doesn’t matter, but thousands will. [1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129?s=20 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129...
  - magicalist 3y ago
    It says it doesn't affect ranking and their quote tweet is even more explicit https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689297947740295168 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689297947740295168
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
      This is the actual quote from Google PR: >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. Parsing this carefully, to me it sounds worded to give the impression removing old pages won’t help the ranking of other pages without explicitly saying so. In other words, if it turns out that deleting old pages helps your ranking (indirectly, by making Google crawl your new pages faster), this tweet is truthful on a technicality. In the context of negative attention where some of the blame for old content being removed is directed toward Google, there is a clear motive for a PR strategy that deflects in this way.

technion 3y ago

There's an awful lot of SEO people on Twitter that claim to be connected to Google, and the article he links on the Google domain as a reference doesn't say anything on the topic that I can find. I'm reluctant to call that an official source.

bagacrap 3y ago
He claims to work for Google on X, LinkedIn, and his own website. I am inclined to believe him because I think he would have received a cease and desist by now otherwise.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Probably not; anyone can claim to work for these companies with no repercussions, because is it a crime? Maybe if they're pricks that lower these companies' public opinion (libel), but even that requires a civil suit. But lying on the internet isn't a crime. I work for Google on quantum AI solutions in adtech btw.
  - mpixel 3y ago
    with a gold badge, half a million followers, as well as a wikipedia page that mentions he works at google?
  - shortformblog 3y ago
    He’s been lying a long time, considering that he’s kept the lie up that he’s an expert on SEO for nearly 30 years at this point, and I’ve been following his work most of that time.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  He claims to work for google as search "liason". He's a PR guy. His job is to make people think that google's search system is designed to improve the internet, instead of it being designed to improve google's accounting.
  - 3y ago

tlogan 3y ago

Google says so many things about SEO which are not true. There are some rules which are 100% true and some which they just hope their AI thinks they are true.

tyingq 3y ago

They say "Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!" But who knows, really? They run things to extract features nobody outside of Google knows that are proxies for "content quality". Then run them through pipelines of lots of different not-really-coordinated ML algorithms. Maybe some of those features aren't great for older pages? (broken links, out-of-spec html/js, missing images, references to things that don't exist, practices once allowed now discouraged...like <meta keywords>, etc). And I wouldn't be surprised if some part of overall site "reputation" in their eyes is some ratio of bad:good pages, or something along those lines. I have my doubts that Google knows exactly what their search engines likes and doesn't like. They surely know which ads to put next to those maybe flawed results, though.

somedude895 3y ago

I could imagine CNET‘s SEO team got an average rank goal instead of absolute SEO traffic. So by removing low ranked old pages the avg position of their search results goes closer to the top even though total traffic sinks. I‘ve seen stuff like this happen at my own company as well, where a team‘s KPIs are designed such that they‘ll ruin absolute numbers in order to achieve their relative KPI goals, like getting an increase in conversion rates by just cutting all low-conversion traffic.

RheingoldRiver 3y ago
This is why KPIs or targets should NEVER be calculated values like averages or ratios. The team is then incentivized to do something hostile such as not promote the content as much so that the ratio is higher, as soon as they barely scrape past the impressions mark.
- cedilla 3y ago
  When deciding KPIs, Goodhart's law should always be kept in mind: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It's really hard to not create perverse incentives with KPIs. Targets like "% of tickets closed within 72 hours" can wreck service quality if the team is under enough pressure or unscrupulous.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  I mean, ideally you just have both an absolute and a calculated value to ensure both trend in the right direction.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Sure they can, e.g. on-time delivery (or even better shipments missing the promised delivery date) is a ratio. Or inventory turn rates, there you actually want people to attack the denominator. Generaly speaking, an easy solution is to attach another target to either the nominator or denominator, a target that requires people to move that in value in acertqin direction. That might even be a different team thanthe one having goals on the ratio.

tzfld 3y ago

I remember these kind of sources right from inside in the Matt Cutts era 15+ years ago encouraging and advising so many things which later proven to not be the case. I wouldn't take this only because it was written by the official guide.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mediascreen 3y ago

I few tweets down they qualify this, saying that it might improve some things like indexing of the rest of the site: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129 My understanding is that if you have a very large site, removing pages can sometimes help because: - There is an indexing "budget" for your site. Removing pages might make reindexing of the rest of the pages faster. - Removing pages that are cannibalising on each other might help the main page for the keywords to rank higher. - Google is not very fond of "thin wide" content. Removing low quality pages can be helpful, especially if you don't have a lot of links to your site. - Trimming the content of a website could make it easier for people and Google to understand what the site is about and help them find what they are looking for.

londons_explore 3y ago

Google search ranking involves lots of neural networks nowadays. There is no way the PR team making that tweet can say for sure that deleting old content doesn't improve rank. Nobody can say that for sure. The neural net is a black box, and it's behaviour is hard to predict without just trying it and seeing.

gmerc 3y ago

I don’t know man, I read it but I’ve learned to judge big tech talk purely by their actions and I don’t think there’s a lot of incentive built into their system that supports this statement.

catboybotnet 3y ago

Hey, don't do that. That's bad. But if you keep doing it, you'll get better SEO. No, we won't do anything to prevent this from being a way to game SEO. Words without action are useless.

josefresco 3y ago

Speaking from experience as someone who is paid for SEO optimization there's a list a mile long of things Google says "doesn't work" or you "shouldn't do" but in fact work very well and everyone is doing it.

laputan_machine 3y ago

Never has your username been so accurate as to who you are.

hbn 3y ago

RTFA does not include reading through every linked source.

Jiro 3y ago

"Google says you shouldn't do it" and "Google's search algorithm says that you should do it" can both be true at the same time. The official guidance telling you what to do doesn't track with what the search algorithm uses to decide search placement. Nobody's going to follow Google's written instructions if following the instructions results in a penalty and disobeying them results in a benefit.