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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 ince

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.
      - hedora 3y ago
        The tweet is also clearly saying that deleting old content will increase the average page rank of your articles in the first N hours after it is published. (Because the time to first crawl will decrease, and the page rank is effectively zero before the first crawl). CNet is big enough that I’d expect Google to ensure the crawler has fresh news articles from it, but that isn’t explicitly said anywhere.
        Twisell 3y ago
        And considering all the AI hype, one could have hoped that the leading search engine crawler would be able to "smartly" detect new contents based on a url containing a timestamp. Apparently not if this SEO trick is really a thing... EDIT : sorry my bad it's actually the opposite. One could expect that a site like CNET would include a timestamp and a unique ID in their URL in 2023. This seems to be the "unpermalink" of a recent cnet article. Maybe the SEO expert could have started there... https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/samsung-galaxy-z-flip-5-review-its-all-about-the-cover-screen/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/samsung-galaxy-z-flip-5-rev...
        dannysullivan 3y ago
        I did the tweet. It is clearly not saying anything about the "average page rank" of your articles because those words don't appear in the tweet at all. And PageRank isn't the only factor we use in ranking pages. And it's not related to "gosh, we could crawl your page in X hours therefore you get more PageRank."
      - dannysullivan 3y ago
        It's not from Google PR. It's from me. I'm the public liaison for Google Search. I work for our search quality team, not for our PR team. It's not worded in any way intended to be parsed. I mean, I guess people can do that if they want. But there's no hidden meaning I put in there. Indexing and ranking are two different things. Indexing is about gathering content. The internet is big, so we don't index all the pages on it. We try, but there's a lot. If you have a huge site, similarly, we might not get all your pages. Potentially, if you remove some, we might get more to index. Or maybe not, because we also try to index pages as they seem to need to be indexed. If you have an old page that doesn't seem to change much, we probably aren't running back ever hour to it in order to index it again. Ranking is separate from indexing. It's how well a page performs after being indexed, based on a variety of different signals we look at. People who believe removing "old" content aren't generally thinking that's going to make the "new" pages get indexed faster. They might think that maybe it means more of their pages overall from a site could get indexed, but that can include "old" pages they're successful with, too. The key thing is if you go to the CNET memo mentioned in Gizmodo article, it says this: "it sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results." Maybe CNET thinks getting rid of older content does this, but it's not. It's not a thing. We're not looking at a site, counting up all the older pages and then somehow declaring the site overall as "old" and therefore all content within it can't rank as well as if we thought it was somehow a "fresh" site. That's also the context of my response. You can see from the memo that it's not about "and maybe we can get more pages indexed." It's about ranking.
    - zpeti 3y ago
      Dude, like who is google? The judicial system of the web? No. Google has their own motivations here, they are a player not a rule maker. Don’t trust SEOs as no one actually knows what works, but certainly dont think google is telling you the absolute truth.
      - magicalist 3y ago
        Ha, I actually totally agree with you, apparently my comment gave the wrong impression. I was just arguing with the GP's comment which was trying to (fruitlessly, as you point out) read tea leaves that aren't even there.
- SahAssar 3y ago
  In my experience SEO experts are the most superstitious tech people I ever met. One guy wanted me to reorder HTTP header fields to match another site. He wanted our minified HTML to include a linebreak just after a certain meta element just because some other site had it. I got requests to match variable names in minified JS just because googles own minified JS had that name.
  - cde-v 3y ago
    Considering their job can be done by literally anyone, they have to differentiate somehow
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >our minified HTML Unreadable source code is a crime against humanity.
    - henriquez 3y ago
      It’s also a crime against zorgons from Planet Zomblaki.
    - hnick 3y ago
      Is minified "code" still "source code"? I think I'd say the source is the original implementation pre-minification. I hate it too when working out how something is done on a site, but I'm wondering where we fall on that technicality. Is the output of a pre-processor still considered source code even if it's not machine code? These are not important questions but now I'm wondering.
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
        The minified HTML (and, god forbid, JavaShit) is the source from which the browser ultimately renders a page, so yes that is source code.
        naniwaduni 3y ago
        "The ISA bytecode is the source from which the processor ultimately executes a program, so yes that is source code."
- water-your-self 3y ago
  Wrong, the best SEO is having what users want and withholding it long enough to get a high average session time.
  - bmer 3y ago
    And I suppose a corollary is: "claim to have what the users want, and have them spend long enough to figure out that you don't have it"?
  - dawnerd 3y ago
    See: every recipe site in existence.
- samplatt 3y ago
  Considering how much paid-for unimportant and unrelated drivel I now have to wade through every time I google to get what I am asking for, I doubt very much that whatever is optimal for search-engine ranking has anything to do with what users want.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  While CNET might not be the most reliable side, Google telling content owners to not play SEO games is also too biased to be taken at face value. It reminds me of Apple's "don't run to the press" advice when hitting bugs or app review issues. While we'd assume Apple knows best, going against their advice totally works and is by far the most efficient action for anyone with enough reach.
meragrin_ 3y ago
> That only says that Google discourages such actions Nope. It says that Google does not ding you for old content. "Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!"
- reaperducer 3y ago
  "Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!" I guess that Googler never uses Google. It's very hard to find anything on Google older than or more relevant than Taylor Swift's latest breakup.
  - resoluteteeth 3y ago
    I think in this context, saying that it's not a thing that google doesn't like old content just means that google doesn't penalize sites as a whole for including older pages, so deleting older pages won't help boost the site's ranking. This is not the same as saying that it doesn't prioritize newer pages over older pages in the search results. The way it's worded does sound like it could imply the latter thing, but that may have just been poor writing.
    - romusha 3y ago
      "poor writing" is the new "merely joking guys!"
  - pphysch 3y ago
    "Taylor Swift before:2010" With archive search, the News section floats links like https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/arts/music/09cara.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/arts/music/09cara.html
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dannysullivan 3y ago
    That Googler here. I do use Google! And yeah, I get sometimes people want older content and we show fresher content. We have systems designed to show fresher content when it seems warranted. You can imagine a lot of people searching about Maui today (sadly) aren't wanting old pages but fresh content about the destruction there. Our ranking system with freshness is explained more here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking-systems-guide#freshness https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking... But we do show older content, as well. I find often when people are frustrated they get newer content, it's because of that crossover where there's something fresh happening related to the query. If you haven't tried, consider our before: and after: commands. I hope we'll finally get these out of beta status soon, but they work now. You can do something like before:2023 and we wouldn't show pages from before 2023 (to the best we can determine dates). They're explained more here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272
notatoad 3y ago
it seems incredibly short-sighted to assume that just because these actions might possibly give you a small bump in SEO right now, they won't have long-term consequences. if CNET deletes all their old articles, they're making a situation where most links to CNET from other sites lead to error pages (or at least, pages with no relevant content on them) and even if that isn't currently a signal used by google, it could become one.
- bagacrap 3y ago
  No doubt those links are redirected to the CNET homepage.
  - mantra2 3y ago
    Isn’t mass redirecting 404s to the homepage problematic SEO-wise?
    - twelve40 3y ago
      Technically, you're supposed to do a 410 or a 404, but when some pages being deleted have those extremely valuable old high-reputation backlinks, it's just wasteful, so i'd say it's better to redirect, to the "next best page" like maybe a category or something, or the homepage, as the last resort. Why would it be problematic? Especially if you do a sweep and only redirect pages that have valuable backlinks.
      - mantra2 3y ago
        I was only talking about mass redirecting 404s to the homepage, which I've heard is not great, I think what you're saying is fine -- but that sounds like more of a well thought out strategy.
politelemon 3y ago
I think you have misread the tweet. It says it does not work _and_ discourages the action.
victorbjorklund 3y ago
Exactly. Google also discourages link buildning. But getting relevant links from authority sites 100% work.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dannysullivan 3y ago
Hi. So I'm the person at Google quoted in the article and also who shared about this myth here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 It's not that we discourage it. It's not something we recommend at all. Not our guidance. Not something we've had a help page about saying "do this" or "don't do this" because it's just not something we've felt (until now) that people would somehow think they should do -- any more than "I'm going to delete all URLs with the letter Y in them because I think Google doesn't like the letter Y." People are free to believe what they want, of course. But we really don't care if you have "old" pages on your site, and deleting content because you think it's "old" isn't likely to do anything for you. Likely, this myth is fueled by people who update content on their site to make it more useful. For example, maybe you have a page about how to solve some common computer problem and a better solution comes along. Updating a page might make it more helpful and, in turn, it might perform better. That's not the same as "delete because old" and "if you have a lot of old content on the site, the entire site is somehow seen as old and won't rank better."
- Jiro 3y ago
  Your recommendations are not magically a description of how your algorithm actually behaves. And when they contradict, people are going to follow the algorithm, not the recommendation.
  - darklycan51 3y ago
    Exactly this, not any different than how they behave with youtube, it seems deceptive at best
    - mangodrunk 3y ago
      Yeah, Google’s statement seems obviously wrong. They say they don’t tell people to delete old content, but then they say that old content does actually affect a site in terms of it’s average ranking and also what content gets indexed.

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.
    - hedora 3y ago
      The tweet is also clearly saying that deleting old content will increase the average page rank of your articles in the first N hours after it is published. (Because the time to first crawl will decrease, and the page rank is effectively zero before the first crawl). CNet is big enough that I’d expect Google to ensure the crawler has fresh news articles from it, but that isn’t explicitly said anywhere.
      - Twisell 3y ago
        And considering all the AI hype, one could have hoped that the leading search engine crawler would be able to "smartly" detect new contents based on a url containing a timestamp. Apparently not if this SEO trick is really a thing... EDIT : sorry my bad it's actually the opposite. One could expect that a site like CNET would include a timestamp and a unique ID in their URL in 2023. This seems to be the "unpermalink" of a recent cnet article. Maybe the SEO expert could have started there... https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/samsung-galaxy-z-flip-5-review-its-all-about-the-cover-screen/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/samsung-galaxy-z-flip-5-rev...
      - dannysullivan 3y ago
        I did the tweet. It is clearly not saying anything about the "average page rank" of your articles because those words don't appear in the tweet at all. And PageRank isn't the only factor we use in ranking pages. And it's not related to "gosh, we could crawl your page in X hours therefore you get more PageRank."
    - dannysullivan 3y ago
      It's not from Google PR. It's from me. I'm the public liaison for Google Search. I work for our search quality team, not for our PR team. It's not worded in any way intended to be parsed. I mean, I guess people can do that if they want. But there's no hidden meaning I put in there. Indexing and ranking are two different things. Indexing is about gathering content. The internet is big, so we don't index all the pages on it. We try, but there's a lot. If you have a huge site, similarly, we might not get all your pages. Potentially, if you remove some, we might get more to index. Or maybe not, because we also try to index pages as they seem to need to be indexed. If you have an old page that doesn't seem to change much, we probably aren't running back ever hour to it in order to index it again. Ranking is separate from indexing. It's how well a page performs after being indexed, based on a variety of different signals we look at. People who believe removing "old" content aren't generally thinking that's going to make the "new" pages get indexed faster. They might think that maybe it means more of their pages overall from a site could get indexed, but that can include "old" pages they're successful with, too. The key thing is if you go to the CNET memo mentioned in Gizmodo article, it says this: "it sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results." Maybe CNET thinks getting rid of older content does this, but it's not. It's not a thing. We're not looking at a site, counting up all the older pages and then somehow declaring the site overall as "old" and therefore all content within it can't rank as well as if we thought it was somehow a "fresh" site. That's also the context of my response. You can see from the memo that it's not about "and maybe we can get more pages indexed." It's about ranking.
  - zpeti 3y ago
    Dude, like who is google? The judicial system of the web? No. Google has their own motivations here, they are a player not a rule maker. Don’t trust SEOs as no one actually knows what works, but certainly dont think google is telling you the absolute truth.
    - magicalist 3y ago
      Ha, I actually totally agree with you, apparently my comment gave the wrong impression. I was just arguing with the GP's comment which was trying to (fruitlessly, as you point out) read tea leaves that aren't even there.
SahAssar 3y ago
In my experience SEO experts are the most superstitious tech people I ever met. One guy wanted me to reorder HTTP header fields to match another site. He wanted our minified HTML to include a linebreak just after a certain meta element just because some other site had it. I got requests to match variable names in minified JS just because googles own minified JS had that name.
- cde-v 3y ago
  Considering their job can be done by literally anyone, they have to differentiate somehow
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >our minified HTML Unreadable source code is a crime against humanity.
  - henriquez 3y ago
    It’s also a crime against zorgons from Planet Zomblaki.
  - hnick 3y ago
    Is minified "code" still "source code"? I think I'd say the source is the original implementation pre-minification. I hate it too when working out how something is done on a site, but I'm wondering where we fall on that technicality. Is the output of a pre-processor still considered source code even if it's not machine code? These are not important questions but now I'm wondering.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      The minified HTML (and, god forbid, JavaShit) is the source from which the browser ultimately renders a page, so yes that is source code.
      - naniwaduni 3y ago
        "The ISA bytecode is the source from which the processor ultimately executes a program, so yes that is source code."
water-your-self 3y ago
Wrong, the best SEO is having what users want and withholding it long enough to get a high average session time.
- bmer 3y ago
  And I suppose a corollary is: "claim to have what the users want, and have them spend long enough to figure out that you don't have it"?
- dawnerd 3y ago
  See: every recipe site in existence.
samplatt 3y ago
Considering how much paid-for unimportant and unrelated drivel I now have to wade through every time I google to get what I am asking for, I doubt very much that whatever is optimal for search-engine ranking has anything to do with what users want.
makeitdouble 3y ago
While CNET might not be the most reliable side, Google telling content owners to not play SEO games is also too biased to be taken at face value. It reminds me of Apple's "don't run to the press" advice when hitting bugs or app review issues. While we'd assume Apple knows best, going against their advice totally works and is by far the most efficient action for anyone with enough reach.

meragrin_ 3y ago

> That only says that Google discourages such actions Nope. It says that Google does not ding you for old content. "Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!"

reaperducer 3y ago
"Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!" I guess that Googler never uses Google. It's very hard to find anything on Google older than or more relevant than Taylor Swift's latest breakup.
- resoluteteeth 3y ago
  I think in this context, saying that it's not a thing that google doesn't like old content just means that google doesn't penalize sites as a whole for including older pages, so deleting older pages won't help boost the site's ranking. This is not the same as saying that it doesn't prioritize newer pages over older pages in the search results. The way it's worded does sound like it could imply the latter thing, but that may have just been poor writing.
  - romusha 3y ago
    "poor writing" is the new "merely joking guys!"
- pphysch 3y ago
  "Taylor Swift before:2010" With archive search, the News section floats links like https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/arts/music/09cara.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/arts/music/09cara.html
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dannysullivan 3y ago
  That Googler here. I do use Google! And yeah, I get sometimes people want older content and we show fresher content. We have systems designed to show fresher content when it seems warranted. You can imagine a lot of people searching about Maui today (sadly) aren't wanting old pages but fresh content about the destruction there. Our ranking system with freshness is explained more here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking-systems-guide#freshness https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking... But we do show older content, as well. I find often when people are frustrated they get newer content, it's because of that crossover where there's something fresh happening related to the query. If you haven't tried, consider our before: and after: commands. I hope we'll finally get these out of beta status soon, but they work now. You can do something like before:2023 and we wouldn't show pages from before 2023 (to the best we can determine dates). They're explained more here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272

notatoad 3y ago

it seems incredibly short-sighted to assume that just because these actions might possibly give you a small bump in SEO right now, they won't have long-term consequences. if CNET deletes all their old articles, they're making a situation where most links to CNET from other sites lead to error pages (or at least, pages with no relevant content on them) and even if that isn't currently a signal used by google, it could become one.

bagacrap 3y ago
No doubt those links are redirected to the CNET homepage.
- mantra2 3y ago
  Isn’t mass redirecting 404s to the homepage problematic SEO-wise?
  - twelve40 3y ago
    Technically, you're supposed to do a 410 or a 404, but when some pages being deleted have those extremely valuable old high-reputation backlinks, it's just wasteful, so i'd say it's better to redirect, to the "next best page" like maybe a category or something, or the homepage, as the last resort. Why would it be problematic? Especially if you do a sweep and only redirect pages that have valuable backlinks.
    - mantra2 3y ago
      I was only talking about mass redirecting 404s to the homepage, which I've heard is not great, I think what you're saying is fine -- but that sounds like more of a well thought out strategy.

politelemon 3y ago

I think you have misread the tweet. It says it does not work _and_ discourages the action.

victorbjorklund 3y ago

Exactly. Google also discourages link buildning. But getting relevant links from authority sites 100% work.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dannysullivan 3y ago

Hi. So I'm the person at Google quoted in the article and also who shared about this myth here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 It's not that we discourage it. It's not something we recommend at all. Not our guidance. Not something we've had a help page about saying "do this" or "don't do this" because it's just not something we've felt (until now) that people would somehow think they should do -- any more than "I'm going to delete all URLs with the letter Y in them because I think Google doesn't like the letter Y." People are free to believe what they want, of course. But we really don't care if you have "old" pages on your site, and deleting content because you think it's "old" isn't likely to do anything for you. Likely, this myth is fueled by people who update content on their site to make it more useful. For example, maybe you have a page about how to solve some common computer problem and a better solution comes along. Updating a page might make it more helpful and, in turn, it might perform better. That's not the same as "delete because old" and "if you have a lot of old content on the site, the entire site is somehow seen as old and won't rank better."

Jiro 3y ago
Your recommendations are not magically a description of how your algorithm actually behaves. And when they contradict, people are going to follow the algorithm, not the recommendation.
- darklycan51 3y ago
  Exactly this, not any different than how they behave with youtube, it seems deceptive at best
  - mangodrunk 3y ago
    Yeah, Google’s statement seems obviously wrong. They say they don’t tell people to delete old content, but then they say that old content does actually affect a site in terms of it’s average ranking and also what content gets indexed.